"No one knows about them, but I've been talking about them for years: this is the one with 'Loud Green Song', 'Singing The Blues On Reds'. People associate me with straightahead rock'n'roll, but this is the stuff that I liked - I couldn't play it and I didn't try to play it. I don't know how I heard about Patto, but they seemed like irreverent guys. The singer, Mike Patto was also in Spooky Tooth and Boxer - you have to look at Boxer's album cover - and he died of cancer. Ollie Halsall was one of the best guitarists there was, left handed and he played unbelievably. I always liked songs better than I liked groups. Groups will let you down, but songs stand up on their own."

"Nobody had been doing intricacy and harmony, arrangements and detail in the recording studio as much as Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys. He just made us all think again, certainly to stand up and listen again too, just like The Beatles did with Sgt. Peppers. Pet Sounds was also influential in my career because Mike Hurst, the producer who discovered me if you like, was absolutely infected with this album. So when it came to recording me, he tried his best to make it sound like Pet Sounds. That’s why I have such large arrangements in my early songs. It was not really something that was connected to me, but rather to that record, so it was quite interesting about the history of that."

"Mike Leigh’s a big filmmaker for me; I’m just now realizing how influenced I am by him. I keep returning to his movies, and I could watch them over and over. Naked does seem different than all of his other films—he’s got a darkness throughout all his other stuff, but this one is the darkest. You get hints of the mystery of how he’s working with the actors and how close they are with each other. There’s a part of me that’s jealous of that but also wants to aspire to that, to have that kind of intimacy in the way you create characters. When you watch his movies you can feel how hard they’ve worked and how immersed they were."

"My favorite genre: movies that are for children that are not for children at all. (And when Mike Patton, with Fantômas, covered one of its songs on the band’s 2001 album, The Director’s Cut, an even darker veil was pulled over the film.) This film sends me back to summer nights down South, running through the woods long after the dinner bell rang. I’d freeze on the line between our glowing yellow porch light in front and the deeper woods behind. The compact blackness of those deeper woods terrified me, but it hypnotized me more. The Night of the Hunter’s river sequence and the title sequence of To Kill a Mockingbird are the truest portrayals of childhood that have ever been captured on film."