"This was another sonic influence on the record - the saxophone, the guitar. If you’re painting a picture it’s like 'What colours do you want?' Every instrument is a colour and with this we’re only using a few different colours. It's in how it sounds and how it feels to listen to, it's not necessarily about the actual instruments, it's about what it visually feels like. “Yoko’s record was produced by Phil Spector and on Oh My God the subject matter is a little absurd and it's fun to be sort of playful with it. Back to the cinematic thing, it exists in this big, bombastic universe and mimics the Phil Spector sound. “I just read the Jeff Tweedy book and I really related to him saying that basically his whole life and everything he does is essentially influenced by two different records. One's a record of just train sounds like cabooses, it's not music, it's just train sounds. The other one, I forgot, I think it's Johnny Cash or something. ""Yoko used the heartbeat of her unborn baby on a song she made with John Lennon and I really relate to that; I'm really into the atmosphere of songs and how everything in the world can be its own music. I saw a quote from Neko Case recently where she said 'When you're an artist and work for yourself, your job never ends!"

"It was difficult to choose a Sparks record. I think Sparks are unique. Even though they’ve progressed through the early seventies ‘Visconti sound’ – it’s not glam rock, it’s something else. It’s of its time because it influenced so much of what came after it. I don’t think it was really like anything before it, but then they progressed and switched to Giorgio Moroder and those early 80s records like Angst In My Pants, and then they went Eurodisco in the nineties too. One of my favourite Sparks songs is 'When Do I Get To Sing ""My Way""'. That captures again that melancholy, it’s such a wonderful, wonderful song but wry with a sense of humour too. Lyrically I think it’s an incredible record because it was at odds with what was going around at the time. You had John Lennon doing the confessional ballad songwriting about 'this is the emotion I feel' and it’s very bare. And then you have the preposterous fantasy of prog rock. Whereas to me they approached lyrics more from the perspective of writing a film script or someone writing a novel, or even more from the Cole Porter type of lyric writing. It was based around characters and there’s extremes of emotion, like the song 'Equator' which ends the record. It’s about arranging to meet someone on a particular place on the equator at a particular time and it sets up this romantic premise, and the character gets there but the other lover isn’t waiting for him. You have this heartbreak and even though Russell is singing it in the first person, it seems to be written from a third person perspective. You have these characters created by Ron for Russell to articulate, in the way a scriptwriter would write to bring a character to life. It’s one of those records I literally wore the groove out to. Ron’s arrangements too, how he got a rock band into play how an orchestra would, but not in a pretentious way at all. The melodies are really direct and cool. It’s a real joy to listen to."

"We all lived in a house together and I remember hearing David putting the finishing touches on that one in his bedroom. He wasn't a pianist, but he could change chords and have a rhythmic thing going. The lyrics on that one really got my attention, 'Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow' and all that. But it wasn't really until we got into the studio and got Rick Wakeman in on piano… I mean, David just told him to treat it as a piano piece, like a long solo all the way through. Rick's like a virtuoso so he just went to town on it! Then we had to pull something together to go with that. We had mapped it out a little bit because we already knew there would be a string arrangement that Mick had done on it, so I went through the string arrangement and knew what I could and couldn't do. I knew the ballpark. It still needed to be a solid beat, but kind of a futuristic-meets-classic rock thing because of the strings being so overpowering and Rick's playing was more classical than rock. I think the lyrics were very John Lennon-inspired – 'I am the egg man' sort of thing. There was a concept behind the song, but it wasn't that obvious. It was like painting a picture. He did actually give us a brief description, that it was about a girl who was dissatisfied with life and was always dreaming of another place that's better, but didn't know where it was or how to get there – maybe Mars… maybe Mars is the place? We did it three times in the studio and, when you are recording, you finish and you all stay silent as possible, you don't even sneeze because it will cause problems with the mixing later, but on that third time, the phone rang. We didn't even know there was a phone in the studio! It was one that was used by session musicians to ring out on, but it had never rang before. It rang all over the end of the song. It was a really pleasurable experience listening to it after it had been mixed for the first time. I think this might be my all-time favorite of Bowie's tunes."