"What a great songwriter and lyricist Shane MacGowan is. It’s funny as last night I was going through some of these again to listen to them, as they’re maybe records I hadn’t listened to for a while. Rum Sodomy & The Lash is one I hadn’t played for a while, but I knew it was one I’d played to death at different points in my life, so I thought “I’ll go back and listen to that again, I wonder if it does hold up”. There are other records that I thought would make the list that didn’t make it, that I still thought were good and I can appreciate why I loved them when I was 16, like Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables, which I still think is a great record, but there’s something that makes Shane MacGowan one of the greats of the century, like 'The Old Main Drag' – you don’t know when it’s written, like 1912 or 1982, you know? Very few people can write songs like that. Music that is specifically about place and characters yet it seems timeless. To pull that off is astonishing. Also they saved folk music from the twats; unfortunately they seem to have reclaimed it in recent years. Suddenly folk music became violent and soaked in whiskey again as it should be! In a way that the Irish community in London are neither Irish nor London, they’re just their own thing; The Pogues were neither punk nor folk. Shane McGowan’s delivery – he can take a song like Ewan McColl’s 'Dirty Old Town' or 'A Pair Of Brown Eyes' or 'The Band Played Waltzing Matilda' and give them a poignancy or life or meaning, or a dirt and raw-bloodied abrasiveness which most performers could never bring to a place like that."

"Neil Hannon, for me, is the greatest living songwriter that we have, apart from Paul McCartney probably. I think the guy’s an absolute genius. Lyrically, he’s a complete master. The attention to detail is just extraordinary. Absent Friends starts with a great song that name-checks all his inspirations and then there’s 'Leaving Today' which I can really relate to; it’s a song about how he wakes up and his girlfriend is clinging to him like the morning dew, saying, “Don’t go, don’t go off again”… it’s this kind of heart-melting song about how he’s got to get up, get in a taxi and bugger off. 'Our Mutual Friend' is probably the best story I’ve ever heard in six minutes. With that song, it’s such a perfect pop song, we asked Neil about it, when he came and did something with Keane a few years back. Tim [Rice-Oxley, Keane keyboardist] asked him, “What is it about 'Our Mutual Friend', why couldn’t that have been a single?” He said, “I just couldn’t cut the song down to make it any shorter for the radio”. And it just illustrates that thing about how fucking annoying it is, that peoples’ attention spans are only three minutes long and you can’t have anything longer than that on the radio, unless it’s 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. It really annoys me that a song like 'Our Mutual Friend' will never find its place even though it deserves it. I think the same can be said for most of Neil’s writing, if pop music was a more intellectual pursuit, which maybe is a contradiction in terms, but if it were, then Neil would be lauded as the King."

"When I want to cheer myself up, I think of Ian Dury – the best lyricist in English music, who fused music hall and funk, the first Cockney rapper. The music is always there and the music is very good, but it’s easy to miss the joyous flow of words when you’re listening to it. That’s where Hallo Sausages: The Lyrics of Ian Dury, edited by his daughter, is sublimely useful. Along with great photographs and a tender memoir, it collects the words for all the songs. So you can actually read “Reasons to Be Cheerful (Part Three)”, and get all the brilliant internal rhymes: “Seeing Piccadilly, Fanny Smith and Willy / Being rather silly and porridge oats.” There’s that great exercise in admiration and mockery, “There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards” – people like Einstein and Van Gogh – with its running refrain: “Probably got help from their mum who had help from her mum.” And everyone’s favourite, “Hit me With Your Rhythm Stick” (“Two fat persons, click, click, click”). Who couldn’t love a songwriter who has a song called “Plaistow Patricia”? Actually, my favourite Dury song is not cheerful, but terribly sad, “You’ll See Glimpses”, which takes the form of a letter written by someone who has been locked up because his mind doesn’t work properly. This letter is utopian: the inmate lists everything he would do to sort out “the problems of the world”. It ends: “This has been got out by a friend.” Go and listen to it – Dury doesn’t sing but reads the words, jauntily. Yet it’s profoundly sad, and seems to me as great a work of art as any novel or short story of the last 40 years."