"When I was about 15, Danny and Mick [Quinn, Supergrass bassist] lived in this row of cottages that was literally 10 metres from my family house. That was our base; we’d get together in Mick’s living room. I feel very lucky to have been in a band at that time because we were still approaching music – playing live, writing and recording – the way they had since the beginning; it was the last little window where there was only two-inch tape recording, just a few A&R men around who would come to gigs and stuff, no internet, mobile phones. It seems weird now! We were in the house getting stoned and playing loads of records, everything from Pink Floyd to Gong, Muppets albums, Zappa and Patti Smith. A big one for us was Brian Eno’s Here Come The Warm Jets – it was one we were really hooked on. For somebody so experimental he had killer melodies and the way he double-tracked his voice is just really cool. The production and instrumentation are kind of understated and hint at lo-fi, but in an honest way. We had a meeting with him in New York in the early 00s about producing us. I don’t think it was anything creative that was the issue, it was a boring calendar thing from what I remember, but it was great to meet him and have a chat."

"Here's a band that's influenced anyone who's ever heard them - including me! They were the teenage band that pulled you out of the muck of post-puberty. It made sense in a J. D. Salinger kind of way. Confronting the world, kicking against the pricks, all those sort of motifs that you get with teenage years. The Chameleons were the band that organised your attack through the crap that was going on around you. Here's a story: when we first came over in '89, I thought The Chameleons were so massive. So I thought I'd ask people, ""Hey, when are The Chameleons playing Wembley? We're here, I want to see them!"" And they'd say, ""Never heard of them mate."" So I'd be like, ""No, no, no, The Chameleons, y'know, Script Of The Bridge?"" I'd just keep asking what enormo-dome they would be playing. And I could not believe how small a cult following they had - I was stunned to hear that this band didn't have such a wide following. In my view this band was bigger than Pink Floyd. I'm now friends with Mark Burgess and have been for 30 years. I'm always marveled by the stories that he tells me from the twists and turns of the band to how they could've been big but weren't. Script Of The Bridge is one of those lingering drones in music that's always been in the background."

"I’d have to include Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, a Jacques Tati movie, which I remember watching at my school when I was 17, and it was such a revelation for me as a movie, as a sort of a comedy tone and attitude which I’d never seen. Almost purely visual, for a start; no words. And like most people, in terms of comedy movies, I’d been brought up on British and American comedy movies, which tend to be fast moving, and they tend to be very verbal, with the exception of the Pink Panthers, actually. Of course, I could veer off into that in terms of the Peter Sellers… But it just had a fabulous comic tone and comic attitude which I’d never seen before, which is basically where you just sit back and watch people behaving in a slightly exaggerated way. And, again, if comedy is exaggerated truth, there it was again. It was the pace of it, the slow pace of it. That’s what was such an eye-opener for me, and taught me one thing, really, which is that comedy is not about pace. It’s about rhythm. Rhythm is what’s important, and the rhythm can be surprisingly slow and still funny. And even if you know the joke’s coming, even if you can hear the joke trundling just the other side of the horizon, and you know it’s going to come over the horizon, you can enjoy it as much as if it’s a surprise. And that was the insight that I feel I got from that."