"I do this playlist on Spotify [Ben Watt's Spincycle] and I stumbled across Gem Roses while doing it. My daughter was 15, 16 at the time, and she wandered into the room when I was playing this, and she suddenly stopped short. "Dad! This is Gem Club!" And I was all, "Yes! Yes it is." It was a really touching moment – this obscure band from Boston crossing over from a teenager to her old dad. We've always been hesitant about imposing music on the kids. When the girls were about seven, we showed them a video of us on Top of the Pops. They burst into tears. They couldn't cope with it. It was outside their comprehension. To them, we're just mum and dad. 
This record is very tender, beautiful and diaphanous. The music hovers, almost. It reminds me of Anthony and the Johnsons and The Antlers, and Christopher Barnes' voice is beautiful. There's a song about a doomed gay relationship, and you feel this different worldview being exposed to you in this very beautiful way. Gem Club supported me a few years ago, and I loved hearing them live. There's a quiet defiance to them, this outsider melancholy, that's hard to resist."

"I remember being a kid when this song came out and I couldn't get it out of my head. I was obsessed with the music video and I kept singing it and dancing around to it. I think the significance now - I don't think I realised it then - was that it's so gay. ""I know now - I didn't know then - that Madonna was referencing the ball culture of New York, which is this incredible culture that queer people of colour started in New York with these underground gatherings. They would fantasise about being different versions of themselves and winning competitions amongst themselves. It was a way to build each other up and to celebrate who they were. ""In many ways, it was very ahead of its time and I think Madonna was inspired by that. She even had that in her video, she had people voguing and people dancing, from that world. I think I remember looking at those dancers and being like 'Huh, they're kind of feminine… Okay.' I didn't really quite process it because I was pretty young. I think there's a lot of subliminal significance for me, seeing one of my pop idols celebrating and being a part of that world for her song."

"This song was on my computer, by a mistake I think, and on our family computer. We had a computer much later on - before computers were normal to have in every house - and we didn’t have a radio or MTV when I was growing up. “I didn’t discover music when I was a kid and I still don’t really, because I don’t have many music platforms on my phone, but ‘A Seated Night’ was randomly downloaded through LimeWire onto our computer and it was the first song that I discovered through technology. “I really love Moby, although I haven’t dived deep into him yet. I love the choir and I think that’s why I fell in love with this song, it’s just so nice. I love arranging myself into a choir and I’ve used a real choir for my music, a gay choir from Norway called Faggots. They’re really good, they just sing like real people and are really talented, more than I ever knew before I was working with them. “They’re on “It Happened Quiet” and “Churchyard” and they’re also on my new record, where you can hear them quite promptly. They’re gorgeous. Ever since I heard this song, it had always been my dream to have a choir on my record.”"

"You know, I really get into… I can just throw it out there, because it was a great… it really was really good, but Shut Up, Little Man. It’s a documentary. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s about these two guys that move into an apartment in San Francisco. And their next-door neighbors are the worst neighbors you can possibly imagine. It’s these two older gay gentlemen that have the worst relationship that anyone could ever have. And they spend all hours of the day just screaming at each other. And so these two guys started recording these arguments. I remember in the 1990s, back before the Internet, if you wanted these odd, like, socially passed-around… Remember like Faces of Death? You could get a VHS copy of it? And so this was… You could go to certain independent record stores and they’d have a small collection of these bootlegged cassette tapes of their arguments. And I remember when we were doing Empire Records was the first time I heard these. And it’s the story of the guys that recorded… They track down the two guys that recorded all these things that were passed around through our generation. It’s a pretty amazing documentary. It’s pretty good."