"The thing about Cat Stevens is I probably prefer Mona Bone Jakon as far as the songs and production goes, it's a little bit starker, a little rawer than the other ones, but the reason I picked Tea For The Tillerman was because of the song 'Father And Son'. It's not my favourite Cat Stevens song at all but it was written for a musical that was never made called Revolutia, a blended word of 'revolution' and 'Russia'. The song sort of doesn't make sense - why is this one guy singing both of these characters? It's Cat Stevens singing the high voice and the low voice - and you wondered, god, this guy was probably at the height of his worldwide fame and he's obviously a master craftsman, he can crank out the songs but why couldn't he get this musical made? Or maybe he didn't want to - it seems like he wanted to and it just never happened. Then he was like, oh, just put it out on the next album. And I think there's a couple of other songs that seem like they could be from that same musical - 'But I Might Die Tonight' I think is kind of similar. All these albums that I really love from the 70s and late 60s - David Bowie's Diamond Dogs or The Kinks' Arthur, and they are songs from musicals basically, but it doesn't make sense there's this one guy singing it. Maybe it's ego or something, but that's why I picked that album. I looked up on Wikipedia what the reviewers thought of the album and I think the Rolling Stone guy talked about "Cat Stevens' occasional overuse of dynamics", which was the thing we were trying to do with Break Line, make things dynamic - start small and get big, and it's just so funny that at that time a reviewer would be like, "I'm sick of all these dynamics - I want more compression!"

"I sometimes worry that I don't like current music. I remember when I was thinking about today's interview that I was so glad this is a current album. Well, actually it's four or five years old. When I first heard this album it blew my mind – it has hit after hit. There is a conviction he has when he does things that could possibly be deemed as being cheesy or not cool and this conviction overshadows all of that and it is wholly satisfying. I knew of him before, but it was a wonderful surprise to hear this music. You hear a song like 'Round And Round' and it is epic – it's like a mini-musical with all the different parts – and everything is so intricate, be it the percussion or the different vocal parts. I think it is a masterpiece. It was really wonderful discovering him and finding that he had a trail of all these really bizarre records that he had been doing for years. You could buy all these weird albums - he was beatboxing on some of them - and I loved generally finding out all of his history. He would tour and not turn up at gigs, or just lie on the ground and shout ""I'm too ill to do this!"" and leave, or he would just turn up with a bag of mixtapes and put them in a tape machine and sing karaoke. I think there are a lot of faux eccentrics knocking around, so it is nice to find someone who is genuinely eccentric. It's satisfying to know it comes from a real place. I was lucky enough to see him play in a church in Koreatown [in Los Angeles] about eight months ago. There is always a worry when you really love a record that a gig might not be as good. He came on stage wearing leopard-print trousers and a floral shirt and carrying a basket of flowers and told us he was Little Miss Riding Hood – it was just wholly entertaining. He is a real treasure."