"I really like songs that are storytelling in a way and The Kinks are great at that. “Waterloo Sunset” in particular sparked a lot of images in my mind about how you write songs and the way that melodies flow. “I think the best songs make you feel a certain way, and it’s a bit more than just the lyric really. The lyrics for “Waterloo Sunset” are brilliant but the song makes you feel like there’s a longing for a lost moment. I love the idea of two people meeting in a crowd, but with the whole atmosphere of the song, as soon as I hear it, I slip back into it and it just overwhelms me. ""There’s also a beautiful lost story within the song, the tale of a city and a river. I read that Ray Davies originally called it “Liverpool Sunset”, from when he was on tour in Liverpool and then later he changed it. “I was pretty obsessed with music from when I was quite young, and I still listen to music an awful lot. I don’t listen to these songs much anymore, but when I hear them, I love them. I think on my musical journey and absorbing that stuff, The Beatles and The Kinks were very much the beginning of it. I’m definitely sticking in an era here!"

"Like The 400 Blows it’s incredibly personal, but as opposed to naturalism it’s much more expressionist; the whole mix of reality, memory, and real fantasy — the character’s fantasy versus the movie fantasy that’s unfolding through the real-time story. The character being a director making a movie, and how it all gets jumbled together and mixed together … to me it creates this amazing concept, that a person’s identity isn’t just one fixed thing. It’s actually — and this is very Fellini-esque — like a carousel of several things that are just always changing and swapping around. You don’t only have one identity, you have several of them, and they’re always changing and you’re always trying to satisfy all of them. Hence, we’re never happy and we never get it right, and it’s all very confusing. But you know, for Fellini, 8 ½ is incredibly optimistic in its own humanistic viewpoint on the beauty of that, as opposed to being smothered and depressed by the realization that this character will never be satisfied and is always disappointing other people. There’s an embrace of the life around him that I find really beautiful. I guess people can say it’s sentimental, but I think he earns it by the end of the movie because it explores so many truthful, and often dark, corners of the human soul."

"It would have been very disingenuous of me not to acknowledge the enormous impact The Beatles have had on music and pop culture. They were lucky enough to be around at a time when people were pioneering with electric guitars and trying out different things and forming what pop music was. The Beatles were the best at it and the masterpiece is ‘The White Album’ because you get to hear them experimenting and going a little further out into the deeper water. Some of the McCartney songs are great, things like ‘Blackbird’, but the Lennon songs – ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ and ‘I’m So Tired’ – are magnificent. ‘I’m So Tired’ is one of those songs I relate to more than any. Certain songs suit our personalities or our way of being. With ‘I’m So Tired’ I’ve been in that position so many times; sleepless nights from jet-lag or too many things going on in my head. Lennon had this unbelievably effortless ability of capturing things and writing that postcard that would become a song. That album is filled with those gems. Of all the things they did, that album is by far my favourite. It’s the most experimental. It made me think you can do what you like with an album, it’s just an experience. Other people were just writing songs; The Beatles were addressing a much broader perspective."