"I was probably 21 and I was doing a lot of driving between North and South Wales. Two of my friends that I was making music with lived in a beautiful cottage in the mountains. There isn't a very good radio reception on the A470, and I was driving a classic car – a Proton! – which had a tape player. I would go to Cob Records in Porthmadog and buy a handful of tapes – classics like Michael Jackson and Madonna that would always get preference in the tape player. They were real sing-along records that were great for driving. Eventually, I remember being absolutely sick to the back teeth of them and decided to give the album Barrett a go. I knew who Syd Barrett was but never really had collected his music. I put this tape in and could not make head nor tail of what I was listening to. I couldn't unravel the songs from the music that was going on. But, weirdly, on these drives I had the compulsion to keep putting it in the tape player and because it was a tape I couldn't be bothered to do any fast-forwarding or rewinding to try and find the next song or flick through impatiently to the final song that I liked. I kind of just had to stick it out with this record. Amazingly, eventually all these songs began to show themselves and what had started off as a really arduous task became hugely, hugely rewarding. For that reason – it being a record I genuinely fell in love with and now absolutely love – I feel wholly thankful that I got it on a tape as opposed to any other format, as I think I could have completely missed it or not stuck with it. It is one of those albums that maybe I don't listen to very often anymore, but I have wonderful memories of and love deeply."

"My Mancunian grandmother, who left school at sixteen to work, was a very smart, insatiable reader. She was thrilled when I went to study English at university for three years, but still read far more than I did in that time. I remember thinking it might have been better, certainly cheaper, to enroll with her. She would mail me novels (always beautiful editions) and I would read the back, maybe a first line, and then pile them up beside my bed and feel guilty for not having the time amid weekly essays. My experience of ‘reading’ then could be more accurately described as ‘coloring.’ Extended procrastination followed by an intense period of highlighting, looking for key words and retaining nothing. Always in a post-midnight panic. Always, it felt like, incomprehensible lines of Chaucer. By the time it came to final exams, I’d read practically nothing post-1960 and so was pretty clueless in conversations about books other people had read. It wasn’t until after I finished my degree and my grandmother was very sick that I finally discovered the meaning of ‘reading for pleasure,’ and got round to chipping away at the books she’d sent, most of which I’d politely pretended to have enjoyed in my thank-you calls. I began with a beautiful blue Virago edition of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, and was electrified. As Rhys’ Antoinette and Jane Eyre’s Bertha began to fuse in my mind, connecting an old favorite novel with a new one, the initial electrical jolt turned into a mixture of rage, wonder, and self-reproach for having put the experience off for so long. I realized I’d probably only told her I “liked” it on the phone. I rang her again, admitted the lie, and told her I wanted to write my own. She laughed and said ‘I knew it. Good. Get on with it.’"