"It was the mid-'80s, I was in my early teens and Simon & Garfunkel came into play. A lot of the acoustic side to my playing comes from Paul Simon. He’s one of the greatest guitar players that ever lived and he’s done so many seminal guitar parts that I just fucking worship! “I first heard them very early in life because my parents had three Beatles records and Bridge over Troubled Water, but that’s not so much a guitar album. The album that changed my life as a guitar player was Sounds Of Silence, and it sort of opened the door into folk and folk-rock and then Bob Dylan. “Anji, the Davy Graham cover, is one of the first tunes I learned to play on acoustic, and it’s an amazing tune. I challenged myself to learn it and got my head round it. That whole album is full of really, really cool guitar playing"

"I'd agree that they were ahead of their time, they were quite minimalist really. Minimal electronic music. When I heard the b-side of 'Electricity', which was a track called 'Almost', that was like hearing Simon & Garfunkel, only in an electronic world. The songs were really simple, there was heaps of emotion in that particular track. It was a record that everybody had in my group, and we all played it at parties and danced to it. I say 'dance', I am not Saturday Night Fever, I'm working on it. I'm trying to break the moonwalk at the moment. 'Electricity', I didn't know what it was about, it just sounded really really exciting. They were a prog rock band in the old days apparently. I was telling the keyboard player about my admiration for 'Almost' and he said, "Yeah that was one of our old prog rock songs, there were seven people in the band"."

"I saw the film The Graduate when I was 15 and heard the track 'The Sound Of Silence' and I immediately went out and bought the songbook and learned every song. Hearing Simon & Garfunkel was the thing that made me decide I would really like to make music for a living. I could play the songs, and suddenly music seemed much less foreign to me. Before that it was watching people on Top Of The Pops doing their thing, and it was just another world to me, it didn't seem like something that could be homegrown or that I could possibly achieve. At the time I'd just started going to the school guitar club and learning basic chords, and this music came along and I thought, ""Ah, I can learn that"". I like the simplicity of the lyrics, and there's a naivety to the songwriting, and when they write about New York and that, now I live here and have been visiting for years, I can see where their inspirations came from. You can't deliberately be naive, you write simple songs I guess, and hopefully something that you do happens in the writing process. I'm really into melody, I couldn't listen to a jazz fusion record for instance, I'm the opposite end of the scale, that's all."

"T. Rex's Marc Bolan was my best mate's hero. I said I didn't like him, not because it was true but because he liked him. Not so long ago he bought me a pristine vinyl copy of Electric Warrior and again I was blown away, the sonic quality, the excitement. I still haven't told my friend that though. I was Pink Floyd, he was T. Rex, I was Simon & Garfunkel he was The Sweet... you see where I'm coming from. It was really sad when Marc Bolan died, who knows what he might have gone on to do. I saw him play in Southend, that was when we were in our teens. We'd go out to gigs, as much as we could afford. I lived in Basildon, and in Southend, which was close to us, there were quite a few good venues to see bands. I'd be surprised at things turning up. I remember seeing Generation X at a hotel ballroom, and that was really exciting, because we were kids and couldn't drink, officially. It was exotic and it was naughty. Southend has quite a musical history, with all the R&B stuff, Canvey Island and places like that, I think some of those clubs still exist, where you can see local bands and shit."

"I didn't give them the time of day until I was probably in my thirties. I've learnt that a lot of the records that you love are things that you grew up with and really excited you when you were a kid. But there a few things that creep in later on, when you realise the greatness. I could've put in Bridge Over Troubled Water, but I didn't at the last minute, because the back end of that record doesn't do as much for me. Whereas the clunkily-titled Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme has got a lot of more of the tunes from them - I mean I just really love Simon And Garfunkel, I couldn't quite pin down the album that I wanted to put in. I think this is the one with most of the songs on it that I love. I'm generally quite a contrary person and I don't like to be told what I like. There's always people telling me "oh, you've got to hear this, it's really great and you'll love it". It's like, "How the hell do you know what I will love?" Music is such a personal thing, you can't tell other people what they will like and what they will love. People have given me things that they think I will love and I've just thrown them out the window of my car I've hated them so much. But this is the exception that proves the rule. I think my favourite is 'Feelin' Groovy' - I could say one of the more arty ones, but I like that one the best [laughs]!"

"I had been keeping my eye on Sufjan Stevens for a while. He's always been surprising me and blowing me away. His song 'John Wayne Gacy, Jr.' has one of the best lyrics I have ever heard. On Carrie & Lowell he made an album that has no standout tracks – everything is just remarkable. Sufjan is a maverick and this album is a delicate, fragile piece about the death of his mother who had problems with schizophrenia and alcoholism. The lyrics are beautiful and he sprinkles in some almost Simon & Garfunkel-style harmonies to these folk songs, while others have an almost Sigur Rós element as well. I took my ten-year-old son to see him play. My son had pretty sophisticated tastes. We sat there, holding hands and weeping at the concert. Sufjan drew an incredible performance from that record that was so full of life and death. Sufjan didn't talk for an hour-and-a-half at that gig. It was like watching a sacred ceremony. The lighting and the visuals were the most profound I have ever seen in any concert. Then, after 90 minutes, he talked solidly for ten minutes. He was geeky, gawky and funny. I thought this must have been a pre-prepared speech. He had us belly-laughing. Then, he went back to the ceremony and it was such a bizarre contrast between this vulnerable boy during his talk, to this shaman performing in stillness. The only other rock musician I think can perform in stillness, to that level of profundity, is Leonard Cohen. I went to see that show three times and it changed every night. His talk changed every night, so it wasn't a prepared speech. He would end the show, after playing these beautiful folk songs, with about 15 minutes of noise, worthy of Sigur Rós and a lighting effect, which I can only describe as what I think the soul will look like when I die. It left me shaking and sobbing. It was one of the top five gigs I have ever seen – and I have seen the greats. Sufjan can get you on all levels. I think he will be seen as one of the greats of this generation."

"I often listen to Simon & Garfunkel now and think they’re terribly produced, but they’re certainly a band who are perfect performers on record. There’s something to be said for their restraint; on a lot of tracks you think there might be a drummer but it’s just so quiet in the mix. When you think about what The Beatles were producing at the same time it’s kind of crazy actually - but it doesn’t matter, because their voices were always there when you needed them and that was all you were listening to essentially. They would supply the harmony for each other, as well as the melody and the words. “’Wednesday Morning, 3am’ has got this absolute perfection to it. Fleet Foxes get pretty close in terms of recording multiple voices, but it’s not somewhere people tend to go. I loved it so much, because you could sing with it and you didn’t even have to sing either of their parts; there was always room for more. I always liked choral music growing up, but I felt that this was what choral music should be doing. “I’ve always loved this particular song: just the sadness in it, the description of his girlfriend and the description of having to go because he’s committed a crime. It’s a really weird angle about these few hours he’s got left and it makes me sad every time I hear it. There’s loads of stuff that I didn’t understand in it too: a ‘hard liquor store’ for example. I had no idea what that meant! But they went to dark places. “By the time I’d heard something like ‘7 O’Clock News/Silent Night’ the whole collage thing had been done so much and it didn’t seem that powerful to me. You’ve seen a hundred films that do it now and having sample speech in songs isn’t that crazy. But I bet when it first came out it would have been pretty amazing."