"I think the idea is happening upon something without any clue as to what context it comes from. That has been the important thing to me. What do they think about this? Is this pop music to them? Is it religious? One very good example for me was I was in Ibiza listening to North African radio stations and this Arabic song came on and I thought: ""Fuck, I've never heard anything like that."" I had a cassette recorder in this little ghetto blaster so I managed to record a little bit of it, but I couldn't figure out what the name of the artist was or anything, so again I just used to walk into record shops where they sold Arabic records and I would sing this song, but I never found it like that. Then I was in Egypt about 12 years later and I was in a market, and there was a guy selling loads of cassettes so I sang this song to him, and in the meantime I'd changed all of the lyrics, which were in Arabic, into English. In fact, the lyrics I've since found out are ""hebeena, hebeena"", but I was singing it as ""heaviness, heaviness"". So I sung this whole song in English to him with this Arabic melody and he was cracking up. He called all his mates over from the other local stalls and was getting me to do it again. So I sang it again and then asked him, ""What is this song?"" and he said that it was Farid El Atrache. He picked out this cassette and that was the song, I'd finally found it. So to have that experience is almost impossible now."

"The Kinks, like The Who, are one of those quintessentially great English singles bands but I’ve listened to this album so many times and I just fucking love it. It’s obviously such a big influence on Damon Albarn’s writing. You know the song ‘Big Sky’? 'Big sky, too big to cry.' You can almost hear someone shouting 'Parklife!' at the end of it, do you know what I mean? On the opening track you’ve got the lyrics mentioning all the strawberry jam, Fu Manchu, Mrs Mop and all this quintessentially English stuff, and when I started getting older so I was listening to records not just feeling them it suddenly hit me, 'These lyrics are fucking outrageous. How do you get all that stuff in there and make it work?' The album is incredible. I’ve got an old album of interviews with Ray Davies and he was saying that he thought it was important that we keep all of this traditional stuff like afternoon tea, cricket and cucumber sandwiches alive because American culture was taking over the world but he couldn’t imagine it taking over England. But then you realise… oh shit… it did. What a cunt. What a cunt. It took ages to come out because of legal shit, got delayed for three years and then no one bought it. I presented him with an award a few years ago and I thought, now’s my chance to get to know more about the writing of such a great album. So I was like, 'So Village Green, tell me about this great album…' And he’s grumpy at the best of times and just went: [snaps] 'Oh, I don’t know.' I was like, 'Ok, good to get that one sorted out finally. Nice to meet you.'"

" Oswald is probably best known for her last book, “Memorial,” an extraordinarily free reinterpretation of the Iliad. (At public readings of “Memorial,” she recites it from memory, in homage to the orality of the original. I was lucky enough to witness this in London. The effect is rhapsodic, spellbinding.) Oswald does indeed have a classical power: she’s at once a grand elegist and a close celebrant of life, a rhetorician and a playful contemporary—a writer who can describe Hector dying in battle but can also depict how he “used to nip home deafened by weapons / To stand in full armour by the doorway / Like a man rushing in leaving his motorbike running.” At the heart of her new book is a long poem titled “Tithonus,” after one of Eos’s lovers from Greek mythology. It is a minutely detailed, ravishing, and rapturously observant account of the English countryside waking up at dawn—what Oswald calls “46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn.” Slowly, the light builds and the stars disappear and the woods awaken to the birds: “as soon as dawn one star then / suddenly none then blue then pale / and the whole apparition only / ever known backwards already too / late now almost gone.” I’m sometimes reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edward Thomas, but the tutelary spirit seems to be Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves,” and that novel’s patient italicized passages (written from the point of view of the author) about sunlight building and spreading across the English landscape. (“The day waves yellow with all its crops” is one of my very favorite sentences from Woolf’s novel, and one that Oswald might easily have written herself.) This poet is, for me, a perpetual inspiration."