"I think it was Mike [Harding] from Touch who first introduced this to me. He said, 'You'll love it, and it's an unbelievable price' which is quite a killer combination if you like collecting things. I bought it and he's absolutely right. It's a master: there's no ways about it, you're hearing virtuosity, ensemble playing to the highest degree. It knows itself inside-out, which means you get this feeling of how it stretches and breathes. Basically if I'm wanting to listen to something from it I close my eyes, fumble around and take one of the six discs out so it's a surprise. Otherwise you can find something for the morning, a raga, blah blah blah. But these are just the most extraordinary devotional love songs. It's from a tradition which has been going on for a very very long time. It's not a part-time job at all; these are people who are dedicated. It's fantastic. I think it's truly inspiring in the sense that it's through listening to that that I've come upon solutions to things that I've been working on myself. It's the peculiar thing: you wake up in the morning having gone to bed with a problem or you're working on something that you don't quite know what the solution to is, and when that marvellous thing happens that all the work gets done in your sleep, it's just the very best. I had an example of that happening with this record. When Dietmar Post and Lucia Palacios were making the Transatlantic Feedback film about The Monks, in order to get the editing done they asked people if they would contribute a cover version of a Monks track. From the proceeds of that they were able to finish the editing. I was working with a Swedish friend of mine who'd introduced me to The Monks so much later than everybody else. I said he had to choose the song, and he picked 'Oh, How To Do Now'. I listened to it over and over so it got into my head and my conclusion was that we certainly can't do it like that, because the narrator of the song is obviously a young man who has extremely sexual feelings for a young lady and I thought it'd be highly inappropriate for us to pursue that angle. How do you get an in? I woke up the next morning and thought, 'I know what to do'. I rewrote their text and took the emotion down, made it more devotional and I thought, 'Ah, that's it, it's like Ali Khan'; you change it into that, so in fact it has one phrase that's basically stretched over half the song, and the other part fell into place. It's either the love or the devotion but also the sense of melody, really stretching out lines. That's an example of it being inspiring and useful."

"I’d always quite liked Leonard Cohen, but when he died we’d just started making this record and that sent me into a deep Cohen shaped hole. It also came at a time where I felt quite lost as a songwriter and we were still trying to figure out what we wanted to do with this record. “That was about eighteen months ago and he really helped me to rediscover my voice I think. He reminded me how important it is to be yourself - to be cynical, to be dark, to try and be sexy, to put all of yourself into what you do, to be idiosyncratic, unique and personal in your approach to songwriting. I was in the midst of trying to write about quite universal themes and attempt to be as universal as possible and I think I maybe lost my way a bit, but he helped me to rediscover things. “He’s just so clever as well. If you’ve got a broken heart the second verse in ‘Take This Waltz’ is so good, I love how he can take a really simple sentence, switch out one word and completely flip the meaning; “There's a concert hall in Vienna where your mouth had a thousand reviews”, that’s so evocative and he does that all the time. For this record it got me into the habit of writing entire songs before the music, I’d write an entire lyric before I had any melody, which is actually what I used to do when I was eighteen. Then I could try and focus on trying to be funny, cynical and as honest and personal as possible. “I guess it’s like the difference between a book and a film isn’t it? People often ask me why I don’t like poetry or read it and it’s because I find it really hard to bring it to life, I’d much rather listen. A lot of my friends say ‘you’re so obsessed with lyrics, why aren’t you interested in poetry?’ but for me they don’t really come to life off the page. Leonard Cohen is a poet, but its poetry set to music and he brings it to life. For me, he’s more relatable and easier to connect with than Bob Dylan, you know what he’s talking about, but he does it in a very clever way. “I chose this song because I had a broken heart when he died. I was almost listening to it as poetry more than a song and actually it’s not my favourite song of his, but in the second and third verses, he talks about people being sentenced to death by the blues and it’s really evocative. I’m sure I wrote ‘Young American’ because of him, that was the first song I wrote for the record and that was lyrics first and then put to music, because of verses like that. I was trying to be naked in my approach to lyrics"

"Ooh! Oooh! It's almost like [an album] that's never been repeated. Bryan Ferry has come close but it was a moment in time for them as a band. It could have been a nightmare to make for all I know but it's beautiful and incredible. At the time I was listening to that, I was getting into the sounds of records and perceiving how they were made and the depth in that record is incredible. Bob Clearmountain mixed it and I wondered [at the time]: what does a mixer do? And then you start to realise 'ah – that's what he does'. The main difference between my hits later in the 1980s and a record like this is that the musicianship on Avalon is pretty amazing. They could choose anyone to play on their records as could Bryan Ferry afterwards. And the nucleus of what their band was pretty amazing itself. Their understanding of what you could get out of a studio was incredible. My records with Stock, Aiken and Waterman are [comparatively] quite narrow. SAW had a bunch of keyboards but not many, maybe two or three they really liked. A Yamaha DX7, Jupiter 8 and the Linn 9000 were their workhorses. They had their little set up and that was the band. Mike and Matt were the two musicians. Matt was an amazing guitar player but he never put that to the front because it wasn't needed. He was a Ringo guitar player - he didn't do anything that wasn't needed! They were all about trying to write and produce hits for the Top 40. No – the top 5! That's all they were bothered about. They didn't do anything that was surplus to requirements. But they also made some crap records that nobody heard! But they found their formula and stuck to it like their Motown heroes. It never seemed cynical to me because they were honest about it. They weren't trying to be cool. They did go out and accept awards but generally speaking, they turned up in jeans and t-shirts – well, Pete was slightly different because he was A&R and the mouthpiece – because they viewed it as work. I met Lamont Dozier once and he said 'I get up, go into my basement, sit at the piano, press play and record and sit there for two hours. Then I come up, have breakfast, answer my mail, do whatever I do, and I go and listen it afterwards, find the good bits and say 'that's a song''. So it's quite workmanlike in a way. I don't think anybody would belittle anything Motown did. But if you want to put a negative slant on it, it's a factory style of doing things. But I also think: that's bollocks. If you're gonna be good at something, you have to put the hours in."

"I could have chosen any of the first three releases by Pixies – the Come On Pilgrim EP, Surfer Rosa or Doolittle. We bumped into Pixies when 'Sit Down' was number two in the charts. We were staying in the same hotel as them. I had seen them on TV and thought they were okay. I didn't get them totally but I thought they were pretty interesting. I went up to Black Francis at breakfast and introduced myself. We got talking for about half an hour and hit it off instantly. He invited me to a gig they were playing that night in London. I dragged two members of James, who had never heard of Pixies, to the show. We were up in the balcony chatting and not totally paying attention. I remember after about four songs, Saul [Davies] turning and saying, ""Have you been listening to this?"" He pushed us to the front of the balcony and we watched genius in front of our eyes. It was incredible – the arrangements, the vocals – Black Francis screams like no other singer – and beautiful subtlety within their post-punk songs. Pixies should have been as big as Nirvana, but never had a cute Kurt Cobain frontman. They were always one of the most ungainly-looking bands on the planet, but they made the most heavenly music as far as I was concerned. I love the surreal nature of the lyrics, that didn't quite make sense. I was a singer and I was all about making sense and communicating, and here was a band that seemed to do the opposite and the results were fantastic. That was quite revolutionary to me. Later, when we worked with Brian Eno on five albums, he would say to me ""stop making sense"" and I would think of the Talking Heads album of the same name, but I would also think of Pixies. With Pixies, not a large amount of people got them back then, as they were too ahead of their time. When Kurt Cobain said that in his perfect life he would have been born as the lead singer of Pixies, many people began to discover them. It meant that when they returned from their hiatus, they were bigger than they were previously as everyone had caught up to realise that Pixies were one of the most influential and important bands of all time. I got to know them a bit more and once went to see them play a tiny warm-up gig in London. I went backstage and was talking to Black Francis about screaming. I was asking how he did it, because when I tried, it wrecked my voice and I couldn't sing. He told me that a Puerto Rican man, who was a chef in a crappy restaurant in California, taught him how to scream. He then tried to teach me. At the time, he failed. I can scream a bit more now, but I think I was born more of a crooner."

"Christy Moore is one of my mum’s favourite artists and I listened to this so much growing up. He had a record, Live at the Point, which we would always listen to on journeys around Ireland and Irish music was the first music I experienced live. My mum was born in Dublin, we would go to Galway and go in taverns all the time and it soundtracked my childhood. “I just recently fell in love and ‘Black is the Colour’ was the song that I really liked and listening to it recently I felt like I was like inside romance. I was like, ‘Ah, I’m so in love right now’ [laughs]. I’ve been quite starved of romance for a really long time and I felt I was in it. I was ‘God, this is so romantic and this is just kind of fucking insane’. I’d forgotten the importance of it and how much I wanted it, so that’s why I put the song in here. “If you get the Live at the Point version, at the beginning he says that he’d heard this beautiful song by this guy and at the end he’s ‘gimme that song!’ He wants it and I love that, that’s so cute - that’s what this is about, it’s sharing stories. Christy Moore heard this guy sing this beautiful song and he’s ‘Come on, give it to me, I want to play that tune, I want people to feel that way’ and how beautiful is that? “I’m Irish, so folk is my origin, sharing songs, telling stories and someone else passing on that story. I’ve been really looking into folklore in the past year, that’s one of the reasons that I really wanted to go to Ireland because I was ‘I need to find a record that’s related to this, this is my culture and this is where I grew up.’ As a kid I played the tin whistle and the Bodhrán. I was winning trophies for Irish dancing, I spent my holidays there and I went around playing in fucking fields with cows. And yeah, I’ve been researching fairies and mythology, I love it so much. “There’s so much ancient, beautiful, really respected and protected traditional stuff in Ireland. The traditional aspect can be so cool, there’s so many amazing musicians that just go down to the pub and play and it’s like breathing to them. I stayed in this little hotel with eight rooms in a town called Kilkee, it was in a bay, it was so cute and there was a family playing music in the pub. There was an eight year old boy just staring off, he was playing the accordion and it was so natural - just a bored eight year old that is a fucking genius and has no idea. And then if someone sang an old traditional song a cappella, everyone in the pub would go silent. It was like a movie or something."

"I mentioned Johnny's record store, and as well as Suicide, which is ironic considering he killed himself, he got me to listen to Nick Drake. This is such a perfect record, the songs are perfect, the singing's perfect, the instrumentation (even though Phil Collins plays on the songs) is perfect. It was one of those records that didn't need any explaining. I walked in, it was playing, and I asked 'what's this?', I thought it maybe was a Cat Stevens b-side. He told me it was Nick Drake and that I should buy it and he gave me a discount on the record because he was such an evangelist for it, and thought it was one of the best records ever made and that people needed to learn about Nick Drake. I took it home and fell in love with it. It's been a constant for me ever since. I can't imagine a month of my life that's gone by that I've not listened to it. The funniest experience was the first real tour I did, in 1991, with the band The Shamen. It was the first electronic music rave tour of the States, and at the time I didn't drink, I didn't do drugs, I was a very naive little kid and I was on tour with the Shamen, who were all really partying quite hard. I think we liked and respected each other, but we didn't really have anything in common apart from a shared love of electronic music. One day I was in the back of the lounge listening to Nick Drake's Bryter Layter and the singer came back and you could see his face lit up, and you could see he was a huge Nick Drake fan. We bonded over that. The next tour I did was with the Prodigy and Richie Hawtin, and the one after that was with Orbital and the Aphex Twin. During these tours there was a rave scene in the early 90s, but compared to the UK it was much smaller. It certainly existed. One of the reasons why the rave scene in the States is how it is, is because a lot of the people involved do way too many drugs. You get these DJs and performers who get really into the rave scene and then do more drugs in one night than most human beings should in a lifetime, so the burn-out rate is pretty high. In 1996 I was dating this raver girl, and she had gone out and did three hits of ecstasy, three hits of ketamine, some acid and crystal meth and I just remember thinking 'how can your body handle that?' But I guess if you're 19 years old it can handle it for a little while. Definitely that type of drug use led to a lot of people burning out"