"I didn’t know George at that time. I got to know George because of Dave Edmonds. I did a song with Dave Edmonds in Holland because I was doing an album over there – an ELO album – and he rang me up and said, ""do you fancy writing a song for me and I’ll come over while you’re there and I can sing it?"" So he came over and we recorded this track together and he played this big six-string bass. We recorded it, finished it and a few weeks later we’re having dinner, finished dinner, went our separate ways and he shouts down the street, ""by the way, I forgot to tell you: George Harrison asked me to ask you if you’d like to work on his new album with him!"" I said, ""what do you mean, 'by the way'?"" [laughs] As if that shouldn’t be the first thing you’d say over dinner! But that’s what happened. I got invited to George’s and I went there, we got on great and we went to Australia to the Grand Prix together to see if we were going to be pals. And we were. We were great pals and we got on great and we worked together for about 13 years or so. I love Cloud Nine because it was my first outside production that I’d done; it was a big album. And producing a Beatle wasn’t lost on me. It was like, “fucking hell! This is good, this, innit?” You know, it was great because I’d just had a year off and playing in my own studio in England and learning to be an engineer, believe it or not. I’d never really mastered engineering; I’d always been a producer and always had to tell the engineer what I wanted because I couldn’t do it myself. I taught myself how to do it myself and I was much more in tune with all the knobs. You know, I knew exactly which little tweak I needed to do because I’d been there doing it in my own studio for about a year."

"I’ve chosen this because it was such an amazing thing to happen. It sounds really good and it was such a brand new kind of sound. It really was! Not just because me and George [Harrison] produced it but it was the actual thing of it existing even. It came about as a whim when I was working with George on Cloud Nine, and he said to me one night after we finished work and we were having a couple of bevies, he said, ""you know what? Me and you should have a group."" And I said, ""well, that’s a good idea. Who would we have in it?"" And he said, ""oh, Bob Dylan."" And I said, ""oh, Bob Dylan, yeah. How about Roy Orbison?"" And I thought we were joking and he says, ""yeah, OK. Roy’d be great."" And then we both said ""Tom Petty"". We both loved Tom and we’d met him a couple of times. Anyway, everybody wanted to join so that was how the Wilburys came about. And so we went to LA, recorded ‘Handle With Care’, at first as a bonus track for George’s single off Cloud Nine, but when [label boss] Mo Ostin heard it he said, ""you can’t do that! This is the first track off your new group!"" and we all went, ""oh yeah! That’s a good idea."" ‘Cause we had recorded it in Bob Dylan’s garage, which is pretty amazing. We had a barbeque in his back garden and after that we wrote the words to ‘Handle With Care’, finished the words and George had got the chorus but he hasn’t got the verses so I wrote them at dinner time, sang them in the evening and it was finished. We had to mix it at George’s house later. That’s why it’s interesting to me, how it came about. The rest of the songs we did in Dave Stewart’s studio and they were all instant songs. Each song only took a day. We gave ourselves one day to write a song so we did ten days and ten songs. I did have to pinch myself! I got used to it in the end and of course we did another album after Roy had passed but it was a marvellous time and that’s why I chose it."

"We walk every morning down to the sea and along the coast, and every third or fourth morning we stop at the Real Patisserie. We were buying some bread in there and this music came on, so I shazamed it and it was the single, 'Clear', from this album. Matty is the best of a whole group of artists in North America who are drinking very heavily from the fountain of early 70s music, especially relating to George Harrison, Emitt Rhodes and biggest of all, Todd Rundgren. Now I've been a Todd Rundgren fan for a zillion years, and there was a point in the middle of the last decade when I realised that musical recycling is kind of okay as long as you're not doing it exactly the same. I could mention some other artists like Mild High Club and Drugdealer: they're not slavishly trying to make records that sound like they were made in the early 70s, but it's the same harmonic world, and I'm very much a harmonic world kind of person. That's how I hear music. The song 'Clear' touches on things that I just love, and the album didn't disappoint; there were four or five really good tracks on there. And then I was in the Small Batch coffee shop and this music came on and I thought what's that, that's great, and it was another track from the Matty album. I was like, wow, that guy's cool. He's the keyboard player in Badbadnotgood, who I don't know anything about apart from the name, and the fact that it's a really stupid name as well."

"My dad used to work on the buses, and the bits of the vinyl from the triple set turned up on the back of the bus. It went into lost property and never got claimed and he got to keep it, which was pretty fortunate for me. You know how there are certain mainstays in your life that you keep coming back to? It works several ways for me now. I was five-years-old when I became aware of that record and the atmosphere struck me really. It's a Phil Spector production and it's kind of cinematic in its sonic aurora. The use of the acoustics of the room – typical Phil Spector tricks – and coupled to those songs… it had a haunting effect on me as a young lad. I've come to realise that some of the sounds on there have become signature sounds for me. I've been informed by that, you know, how a band's supposed to sound together. It's created a bit of a problem between me and recording engineers for most of my life. Thankfully I can do everything myself now. To me, that's how things are supposed to sound. They should sound like the room they're recorded in. The gentle wisdom of the album really has got me through bad times. I dunno if it's because it reminds me of home, but there's a lot of wisdom contained in those lines. I think George Harrison in general is quietly inspirational for a lot of people. He conducted himself with grace, for people in the dynamics of a band with rather large egos – he sets a good precedent. I can't claim to have always followed that to the letter but it's something to aspire to at least."