"The Blue Nile was another sort of national treasure that I was drawn to and then thrilled to discover they were local. I can't overestimate what it meant to fall in love with bands from Scotland who enjoyed success. It just opened up windows for our minds, because there's a certain particularly being a 70s baby and London just felt so far away – success of any kind, or glamour, felt far away. Whenever a Scottish band would succeed on a national level it felt really immense. 

 What I also just loved about The Blue Nile was how evocative and sad they sounded. I loved the sorrow in their records, because up until hearing them, I'd hadn't really heard sorrow. I'd heard non-conformity, I'd heard rebelliousness with Siouxsie and the Banshees or The Clash, but I'd not heard sorrow. 

 Depression and sadness have always been a part of my language and my family all sort of thought or considered me a complete freak as a result. They just thought this whole darkness and my gloominess was an annoyance and at best, an irritant. But to me it's always been part of my interfacing with the world. Sorrow, sadness and depression – it's just existed in me and it's part of, I think, human nature. 

 When I heard Blue Nile, I was like, 'Ah, old friend, I recognise you, there you are. Somebody else feels the same as me'. I loved the sort of expansiveness of their sound. It felt very sort of like a modern Frank Sinatra to me, in a way. It's an obvious comparison but the sweeping, Nelson Riddle-esque type of sonic landscapes just really captured my imagination. 
 
 Paul Buchanan's got this ache in his voice that's, again, very unusual. You don't really hear a lot of people sound like Paul. I loved the sort of ordinariness of the lyrics too – it was very much sort of relatable, simple, and unglamorous expressions of love; I just really identified with that. 

 Pop music has always just alienated me for one reason or another – I just don't identify with it or understand it. So somebody like Paul Buchanan and the Blue Nile literally speaks my language. It's a language that isn't often used or utilised in day-to-day culture. I think we're all encouraged to hide our mental health issues, or encouraged to hide our depression, our sadness and our griefs. I believe in the expression of grief: I think it's imperative for a joyful life, and why live if you can't live joyfully? 

 To live joyfully one must express negative emotions. It's really, really important. And those people who shirk from so-called negative expression, I think, are cutting off an entire part of their own happiness and existence."

"I'm gonna go for a topical one... Obviously Stuart Adamson came out of The Skids. John Peel called him the Scottish Hendrix, and I loved The Skids. Absolutely loved them. Then he went on to form Big Country. And first of all I had to take a step back from it, but I just loved the way he put myths and folklore - Scottish folklore - into music, but he also linked it up with the modern day era. All those myths and belief systems were very prescient of modern day culture: how people use music to deal with loss, how people use music to deal with lostness in society, with poverty, with trying to strive to remain above the dignity level. And I thought that was quite a noble ambition for a musician, really. Lots of musicians have done that in different guises, but because Big Country was wrapped up in a certain Scottishness in the music, and what some people have called the Celtic mist in their music, they were utterly pilloried in the press. I love the music press and I love music journalism, but sometimes the music press have to be called to account, and they should give the musical kudos and reparations to Big Country and Stuart Adamson, who's sadly not with us. I also used to think, why is it that Billy Bragg's allowed to have a folk edge to him? The Men They Couldn't Hang had a folk edge to them; The Pogues were allowed to have a folklore edge to them, and people find it acceptable with The Pogues because they could get drunk to it. But Big Country were mercilessly slammed for being Scottish, whining, bagpipes… I look back and think it's a music journalism crime, what happened to them, and what happened to Stuart Adamson. You look at the album and you've just got so many songs which just touch upon the post-Thatcher unemployment that was going on in Scotland at the time... And the English-based press just absolutely slammed him for it; they just thought he was a man dealing in myth and outdated folklore and I think it's disgusting. I remember, in the sleevenotes, he said he understood the power of music way before he understood its language, and that's what he was trying to do with Big Country. It was a noble, amazing achievement which was treated with… what would you call it? Just London-dominated disdain. I'd like to redress that just by picking it. A folk influence is very much allowed in English music today, whether it be fucking Frank Bloke or Mumford And Sons with their Cath Kidston version of it. It's allowed through the gate; it's allowed to sell millions; it's allowed to have a voice. So there is a symbolism there. It's enough to make you want to be independent, the way Big Country were treated by the music press!"