"’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."

"There’s a lot of albums and a lot of artists. There are bands or individuals in which the body of their work or an entire album would be big for me, but then, trying to think of just one track, I felt there should be something from Dylan, because I think he’s the greatest. That album John Wesley Harding, I might have listened to that more than any other Dylan and I still listen to it occasionally. I love it, and ‘All Along The Watchtower’ in particular. At that time, I hadn’t heard Jimi Hendrix do it or any other people do it, it was just this song. There’s something so dreamlike about it, something about it that feels mystical, even before I might have known the word mystical. It’s almost like the song is over without anything having happened. Or did it? I don’t know. I still don’t know. Did something happen? Did nothing happen? Of course, there’s the chord change and the sound of it. I love the whole album, how stripped down it all is, but with this song it’s the lyrics which really got me. It’s almost like remembering some words or images from a dream and it’s strongly felt, but then it can’t really be interpreted in the waking light. I was either at home or at a friend’s house when I first heard it and this probably adds to the magic of it. The album was really old and had been played so much when myself and one of the brothers closest to my age got it. To listen to it, there’s so many crackles and pops, it was almost like a fireplace is going. As I was listening to the music through all these crackling and pops and static, it was like listening to some really old thing that’s somehow getting transmitted to you."