"Ah that's the one, unfortunately, Lou Reed hated. He couldn't stand it... but I liked it! There's such a variety of songs on it. There's one song on there - [line cuts out; we reconnect] - I told you Lou Reed hated that album! That song 'Who Loves The Sun', how good is that?! The breakdown on it, it's like a hoedown. They called it an album, but this is just an art project! A lost memo for an album... Let's come up with 16 ideas and just whittle it down. 'I Found A Reason', that song, the melody [imitates it] that was just amazing. 'Rock & Roll', I first heard that in my father's car. He had a Monte Carlo, and I thought that was cool. It came on the radio and I was like, "What is this?!" It was so simple and it was talking about a radio station in New York - and I was in New York, that was where I heard it - and I just loved the rhythm guitar and also the soaring chorus, where it's just like three notes and it kind of soars around. And that became an influence on our song called 'Ed Is Dead' - another homage!"

"I remember being a kid when this song came out and I couldn't get it out of my head. I was obsessed with the music video and I kept singing it and dancing around to it. I think the significance now - I don't think I realised it then - was that it's so gay. ""I know now - I didn't know then - that Madonna was referencing the ball culture of New York, which is this incredible culture that queer people of colour started in New York with these underground gatherings. They would fantasise about being different versions of themselves and winning competitions amongst themselves. It was a way to build each other up and to celebrate who they were. ""In many ways, it was very ahead of its time and I think Madonna was inspired by that. She even had that in her video, she had people voguing and people dancing, from that world. I think I remember looking at those dancers and being like 'Huh, they're kind of feminine… Okay.' I didn't really quite process it because I was pretty young. I think there's a lot of subliminal significance for me, seeing one of my pop idols celebrating and being a part of that world for her song."

"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."

"You know what, I think I’m going to swerve The Godfather and go for The King of Comedy. I love Scorsese – I loved Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Mean Streets — they were all really seminal, but I always like a film which is, if not leftfield it’s not obvious Scorsese. He has made less obvious films, like New York, New York or The Last Waltz, which don’t hit the mark for me, but King of Comedy is a gem I think. Curiously enough I was talking about it to my fiancé at the weekend, saying, ‘You’ve got to see it,’ because I think it’s where we are now as a contemporary celebrity-seeking society. There are Rupert Pupkins everywhere now. What they don’t have, that Rupert Pupkin had, is innocence and naivety. When you see the whole Big Brother world, the way that people are cloying to get famous now, that’s Rupert Pupkin. I remember when I first watched The Office I saw a lot of Rupert Pupkin in David Brent. Rupert Pupkin had such likeability whereas Brent is a toad – you want to watch him fail. With Pupkin you want to say, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t go to Jerry Lewis‘ house. Don’t tell Diahnne Abbott you know him — you don’t!'"