"This is from an amazing live album called Emergency Ward that I found in a record store not long ago. This George Harrison cover has such a powerful vocal performance from Nina with this big dynamic piano backing her up for about 11 minutes. There's something really meditative about it."

"For my last Black Ball (which is the fundraiser for my organization Keep a Child Alive) we did a tribute to George Harrison and played a lot of Beatles songs. It was the first time I really had an opportunity to breakdown each song and see why the Beatles are so amazing. They have this way of creating something simple and deep at the same time. Something easy and complex simultaneously is actually mind blowing—how good they are! This album is surely one of my faves."

"Since I’ve gone back to learn these early Ride songs for the reunion tour, I’ve noticed how much Robin Guthrie’s playing influenced me, and it harks back to Johnny Marr and George Harrison with little patterns and little sort of partial chords with open strings. “Johnny Marr had a little bit of chorus and a bit of echo and a bit of reverb but Robin Guthrie had an absolute grand canyon of reverb! And, talking to him, he is an absolute connoisseur of reverbs and stuff like that. “The Cocteau Twins were very otherworldly and were very influential on the Ride sound. [Record label] 4AD as a whole was a massive influence on us."

"A young John Hurt plays a bitter art school drop-out who forms his own fascist political movement, the Party of Dynamic Erection. It’s very proto-Withnail & I, and it’s not lost on me that George Harrison was involved in producing both Little Malcolm and Withnail. So it’s cool to think that my favorite Beatle helped make the best two movies about crazy assholes in trench coats screaming at each other in shitty apartments. Mike Leigh directed the original production of the play of Little Malcolm and I can also see how the Scrawdyke character may have informed him in creating Johnny from Naked, another misogynistic, visionary crackpot trying to assert his manhood."

"I listen to this record all the way through - even 'Moby Dick'. To me it encapsulates the Led Zeppelin sound, because the engineering on it is so magnificent. The fact that a four-piece band can sound so vast. Obviously there are great tracks on III and IV. But I feel that II is the most complete album. It's amazing to find out they recorded it mostly on tour. Extraordinary. It sounds like it was recorded in one room. I think it's accounted for by the fact they just sound like that. They just sound that magnificent. I was not a huge fan of the first album. I remember reading the story about how, I think it was Glyn Johns again, the story about him playing it to George Harrison, and George Harrison didn't really get it. I wonder if he had played him Zeppelin II he'd have got it. I is not my favourite. On II it felt fully realised. They'd pulled away from that influence of blues; it was still there, but they'd merged it into their own thing. Which again I think is something that people don't associate with Simply Red – we've been enormously influenced by African American music, but we've been influenced by it from a different era. The marriage between black and white started with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and George Gershwin and all these people that ran through music, right through to Elvis, to Jagger, to Robert Plant – we've all in our own ways been enormously influenced by African American music. But the real thing to celebrate is that we made something different out of it. We didn't just copy it. The British especially turned it into something else. It became what we now know as rock music. The Beatles and the Stones are the people who can justifiably claim to have invented what we know as rock music. Not rock & roll, not R&B, not blues, but rock. And that is something to celebrate."

"It's an overlooked record I think. They were in the midst of breaking up. They were writing separately, and here you can really tell the differences between the Lennon–McCartney and George Harrison songs. What I find really interesting about the record is how it's not really polished. 'Glass Onion' is as unique a song as I've ever heard, and with self-reference: 'I told you about Strawberry Fields', 'the walrus was Paul'; I mean all that stuff! It refers to things the fans were talking about. It's a spectacular album. It doesn't connect like Abbey Road or Let It Be anywhere near as fast because the songs are all over the place. In the days when album covers and packaging meant so much, it was just a brave statement to say it doesn't have a title and leave it white. There is no title anywhere on the record, that's fantastic! Just the solo photos of the band inside. It's a strange record."