"OMG, so I heard that in high school and I of course tried to sing along with it but as she's one of the best singers living or dead, she put the bar pretty high. I'd already learned projection, being able to project my voice by doing musical theatre as a kid, and she was somebody who could project really strongly, have a sweet sounding voice, a strong sounding voice; she had just a huge range. Definitely clever lyrics, her songs were the kind of songs you just wanted to belt out. I especially remember the song 'Do Right Woman, Do Right Man', it went, "So if you want/ A do-right-all-days woman/ You got to be/ A do-right-all-nights man", I was like, "What? You mean that you can ask your boyfriend that if you're supposed to be super awesome to him, he has to be super awesome to you back?" Because I always had awful boyfriends who were total dicks so I was like, "Wait, I deserve better?" Here was this woman telling me, "Look if you want me to stay home and not go running around, you gotta stay home and not go running around either, it's a two-way street here." She was basically staying: "I want equality in my relationship." That was a great message to me as high-school kids who had some pretty destructive relationships. Even though I wasn't really able to realise that until much later, it was a great thing to have in my head. I think my mum's boyfriend had her record so I was introduced to it because it was just there at home. I never had a huge record collection or anything, like five records. But when they started dating he had a bunch of records and I learnt about King Crimson, Van Morrison and Aretha Franklin.‬"

"One of the nice things about being on EMI at the beginning of the 80s was they basically let you come in and get as many records as you liked. So I got an awful lot of classical records and worked my way through them. There's only so many things on the contemporary catalogue that were that interesting. You could get a Wire record. You could get this and that, but a lot of that stuff wasn't that interesting. Obviously, being a requiem, this is music for the dead. It's late 19th century, incredibly dynamic. I guess you'd say post-Beethoven, but more romantic, quite emotional. It goes from very, very simple, quiet, plain solo voice and it builds into this huge thing. It draws you in and completely absorbs you. It's like sailing on the sea. There are quiet bits where everything's still and then some storm comes and everything breaks into a furious tempest. It's something that I've been listening to for 30 years. It's something that I'll often play when I'm going to bed, weirdly."