"I heard a really early demo of theirs that someone sent me once and it mentioned me, a really early demo of theirs. I could never work out what position he was taking on me. He goes [adopts Jason Williamson drawl] ‘Baxter Dury!’ and quotes one of my songs, but then he just disses everybody. I said ‘who the fuck is this guy?! I don’t wanna be dissed!’ And then when someone told me he was a fan, I was like ‘thank fuck’, and I listened to the album that broke them. I was living in the country and I was jogging a lot, I remember thinking it was fucking brilliant. I wrote songs like ‘Miami’ and stuff off the back of listening to that album a lot. We became mates and it became a nice two-way appreciation thing. I used some of Jason’s energy, started being a bit less apologetic, so he was an inspiration. We send little caring texts to each other every now and then. He’s a lovely bloke, I really like him loads. He’s really sensitive. I love that they’re now becoming the darlings of that world. They deserve to be."

"Electro 1 represents the kickstart of that kind of music for me and a whole crew of mates. We were 13 or 14, this arty, conscientious little urban crew of kids just roaming around. It was fun, it was exciting because the music was really hard to get hold of, there was only one pirate radio station, I think it was Tim Westwood that did it. You had to tune into it on a Thursday at 4 o’ clock. They would play all these kinds of tunes, but no one else was into them. No one was into hip hop. Everyone else was into that gothy fucking angular stuff, whereas I didn’t know who The Smiths were until about four years ago. We were kind of early pioneers, well, not pioneers, we were rubbish Chiswick kids, trying to be a bit urban, adopting some of the clothes but quite naively. We all looked like total pricks. I always got it wrong and wore a chef’s hat or something. I was like the dude in the band that never looked quite right, the Gary Barlow one who doesn’t fit the clothes that the stylist’s picked out."