"I also loved Madeline L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.” My introduction to it was by my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Jeness, who read it aloud to us in class, a chapter at a time. Each day I could hardly wait for him to begin reading. I very closely identified with the heroine, Meg Murry, a girl who felt extremely disenfranchised in her world. She was physically awkward – skinny, with glasses and braces and crazy hair – felt socially inept, and was close only to her very brilliant, but very strange baby brother, Charles Wallace. Their father, a scientist, has been missing for some time – and one night the crazy ladies next door (witches, presumably – science fiction witches) prevail upon the children, and their friend, Calvin to “tesseract” through time and space to rescue Meg’s father. When they reach the planet where their father is held captive, they discover that it is a place where there is no free will, and beings are governed by a tyrannical “IT” a pulsing, logical brain that insists on conformity. Meg triumphs at the end, by using her illogical self – her passion for language, her emotional heart, and her tremendous love for her family. She saves them using only her awkward, non-conforming self as a weapon."

"Maybe it’s a thing to do with ageing, but I listen to classical music more and more, and there’s just so much. I chose this because I saw it at the Royal Festival Hall, and it was probably the most powerful performance of a piece of music that I’ve ever been to. Its 100 years old now isn’t it? I was reading that the other day and of course there are all those stories about how shocking it was at the time. I wonder how much of it was down to Stravinsky's hype at the time, that this music was making people so upset. I mean, if they were going to the concert they must have known vaguely what to expect. I love the myth around it all. It also does two of my favourite things. Intellectually it’s untouchable theoretically in the way it’s composed and how unrelated it is to anything that went before it and how revolutionary it was, yet when you listen to the music you don’t consider that at all. The reaction to the music has nothing to do with your brain, it’s purely emotional, and if you’re trying to listen to it and analyse it you are missing the point, you've just got to totally open yourself up to it."

"This is a bit of a sidestep, but in 1987 I went to the States on a Camp America. Me and my mate applied and we got in and he went to work in this really posh Jewish camp in Massachusetts somewhere, with all these lovely kids. I was working with these underprivileged kids from The Bronx, in Carmel in upstate New York. These kids were rough. I was 18 and they were like 12 and some of them were bigger than me. I shared a cabin with a guy called Daryl who was from New York. He just played the Run–D.M.C. album all day. Bigger And Deffer was out then too, the LL Cool J album. I just loved it. That was when I got into hip-hop. I wasn't sold on the music. I always thought it was a bit lumpy, before Public Enemy came out. It was missing a groove really. But 'It's Tricky' is really uptempo. It's really aggressive, which I liked. It's got that 'My Sharona' riff and that's not going to send you wrong is it? It sounded great in the house. It sounded so alien. My mum and dad didn't want to know and when you're that age you want to be freaking out the straights."