"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."

"’Something’ is probably the first Beatles song I listened to that I felt personally connected to. It’s not like any other Beatles song, although they have a lot of romantic songs, most of them are kind of playful too, but this has a seriousness about it. It reminds me more of an Elton John song or a Billy Joel song, it’s very lyrical and so relatable too. “I listened to it a lot when I had my first crush - I remember thinking, there’s ‘something’ about her but I don’t know what - I can’t pinpoint it, I just like her. It was my childhood crush song and I suppose it’s that way for a lot of people. It’s a first love song and a first dance song - it reminds me of weddings too. “I still get excited when I hear somebody cover it, I always want to hear new versions of it because it’s a song that you could do any arrangement of and it would always sound interesting."

"Godfather and Blazing Saddles got me into falling in love with film, but this is a pivotal movie that was probably — I think it was 1969 — prior to that I had been to the movies a few times and seen some hideous movies like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and that sort of thing, and The Jungle Book. I went with my cousin to see Butch Cassidy. It was an amazing mixture of what I thought was sort of a poignant character study and a comedy. What’s amazing about the movie — and the reason I watch it time and time again — I had never seen such chemistry between two actors. Newman and Redford were just incredible together, and those sequences in the movie were some of the funniest sequences I’ve ever seen. So they taught me how to stage comedy a little bit, yet at the same time, it had serious undertones. It was beautifully directed and shot, and you watch it today, and it feels like it was made last week."

"This band were in a similar-shaped box to Silver Apples. The nucleus of the band – Joe Byrd – was from an academic background; he was part of the Fluxus movement at the same time as Yoko Ono. He looked like a freak but wasn't druggy. The band were definitely writing lyrics that were less utopian than a lot of the stuff the hippies were writing at the time; there's a subversive edge seeping through the record that's evocative of what was going on in the States at the time – Vietnam, conscription, campus violence, the civil rights movement. You can really imagine this lot playing at a proper happening. A track like 'Love Song For The Dead Ché' is one of the most beautiful songs ever written, whereas some of the rest of it has a real jagged edge, a violence almost, that seems to come from Byrd's more experimental side. It's a very political record. Their second album even more so. I could easily have chosen that; this one just edged it for me today."