"The next one is a little-known obscure album called Hunky Dory! I grew up listening to David Bowie's songs in the background. I knew he existed and knew his hits and whatnot. I had the same thing with The Beatles. When I was 17 I saw that my dad had Hunky Dory and I realised that I had never really actually listened properly to David Bowie. I thought of him as a pop star – which he is – but he's obviously a lot more than that. I remember putting it on and listening to it in the lounge and actually thinking it was almost too much – it was a collection of songs that were all so good that it was too much to digest. It absolutely blew my mind at how mercurial he was on one record. He wasn't writing songs just about love, but about all these crazy, bizarre ideas. It contained really weirdly strange anthems that weren't like anything I'd heard. I remember really trying to piece together who David Bowie was in his entirety, as opposed to him just being that guy who dresses up like a woman sometimes and was a pop star, and beginning to understand the gravity of how talented he was. I remember listening to the song 'Andy Warhol' over and over and over again and thinking it was the best song I had ever heard in my life and then trying to learn it on guitar. So, it was the moment of realising, ""Oh my god, David Bowie!"" but there is no real point in me explaining why it is such a good album. It's obvious."

"Alan Price is definitely someone my parents introduced me to, it's one of those stories like, "Your father took me out on a date to O Lucky Man! and I knew he was cool", but then in high school I had the required Malcolm McDowell obsession - all rebellious and of course once you've watched Clockwork Orange you've got to go back to if...., and I'm pretty sure that O Lucky Man! is the continuation of the same character from if.... and it's just one of those great modern fables. I'm surprised people aren't as into it. If you watch that opening scene in black and white, it's kind of the same over the top kangaroo court scene that we were trying to get in the Break Line song 'I'm To Blame'. The silent scene in the movie is brutal but it's also ridiculous and over the top. Malcolm McDowell has a giant moustache, he's like a South American coffee picker - he's caught stealing coffee beans and they go to his trial and this disgusting judge smoking a cigar, drooling, sentences him to getting his hands chopped off; it's very extreme and it just flashes "GUILTY. GUILTY. GUILTY" and we do that in our song with everyone saying "guilty", it's a little O Lucky Man! homage. The line in that song, "In case of murder in the second degree/ The jury now all agrees guilty/ So you will hang, hang by the noose" and my friend's dad said you don't get hanged for murder in the second degree, but we need that "murder in the second de-gree", that extra syllable!"

"This was a bit of a dodgy situation at the time but I didn’t know that. Tom had asked me to work with him and it was a solo record and that was all I knew. It wasn’t with the group. He used Mike [Campbell, Heartbreakers lead guitarist] for guitar and it was Mike’s studio that we recorded in, in his garage in LA. Tom just stopped me in the street one day in Beverley Hills somewhere and he said, ""I’ve just been listening to George Harrison’s new album. I love it. I’m having a barbecue. Do you wanna come?"" I couldn’t go so he said, ""do you fancy writing some songs together and see what we come up with?"" and I said, ""yeah, I’d love to!"" So I went round his house the next day and after we wrote one, we then wrote, believe it or not, ‘Freefalling’ which was such a big hit for him. So it worked out great and we carried on doing them in Mike’s garage, which was an amazingly sparse studio. It was a garage full of motorbikes and oil cans and bedsteads and things like that - it was pretty amazing! Where him and George looking for that panoramic ELO sound? Well, it wasn’t always that panoramic a sound. I was gradually quietening that sound down that ELO had done and there were less strings. In ELO, it used to be a case of, ""oooh! String day tomorrow!"" and then by about the tenth album it became [adopts dismayed voice] ""oh, fucking hell! It’s string day tomorrow."" I’d had enough of them. I grew tired of the strings. But that’s not why they asked me. It was more the punch I was doing later on and they just liked the sound that I made, whatever it was. They liked something about it."

"Aretha is another phenomenon. The thing I love, now that we have YouTube, is watching the divas talk about one another. There seems to be this real respect for one another, and a real hierarchy! Every diva knew that Aretha was the queen, and she would give her blessing to the others. I love that there was this order! ""Aretha – she’s amazing – with her roots in gospel music. That was such a big influence to me. I loved listening to her gospel album, and you can really see where the freedom that you hear in her pop songs comes from. They’re riffing and she’s letting the Spirit take over her, and she’s so good at playing piano that it translates into the keys as well, similar to how it did with Nina. There are lots of different versions of “Amazing Grace” out there, but I really felt like the lyric had this new gravitas once I’d heard her sing it. ""Recently I went to see the movie Amazing Grace, about the recording of her gospel album. To actually see footage of her giving that performance was pretty mind-blowing. She’s just in the moment; sweating from the energy she’s giving the crowd, and the choir! It was a beautiful moment to watch, and Aretha will forever be a massive influence in everything that I do. ""My Dad is Zambian, and when I go and visit, my aunties and my Grandma and cousins often sing together. The harmonies and the ensemble gives me the same feeling as when I hear gospel music. If you’re ignoring or suppressing emotions, this music and these sounds will just pull everything up and give you this incredible cleansing. ""There’s something about gospel music. When I was younger and listening to the divas, I hadn’t really heard much gospel music. My Dad played me a Kirk Franklin album, and for me initially, it was just the crunch of the chords that the choir was singing and this mass of people singing so perfectly in such unusual harmonies, and then on top of that, these are people singing with belief they’re singing to God. ""When I step inside a church, I feel different. I think it’s just the energy and the intention that people are singing with and have come together in. Whatever faith you have, I think that makes a world of difference. Gospel music is just such a special, higher form of music for me, and it can really make me so emotional. It’s such a great thing that, regardless of your beliefs, we can still come together through music and vibrations of love."