"No one knows about them, but I've been talking about them for years: this is the one with 'Loud Green Song', 'Singing The Blues On Reds'. People associate me with straightahead rock'n'roll, but this is the stuff that I liked - I couldn't play it and I didn't try to play it. I don't know how I heard about Patto, but they seemed like irreverent guys. The singer, Mike Patto was also in Spooky Tooth and Boxer - you have to look at Boxer's album cover - and he died of cancer. Ollie Halsall was one of the best guitarists there was, left handed and he played unbelievably. I always liked songs better than I liked groups. Groups will let you down, but songs stand up on their own."

"Nobody had been doing intricacy and harmony, arrangements and detail in the recording studio as much as Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys. He just made us all think again, certainly to stand up and listen again too, just like The Beatles did with Sgt. Peppers. Pet Sounds was also influential in my career because Mike Hurst, the producer who discovered me if you like, was absolutely infected with this album. So when it came to recording me, he tried his best to make it sound like Pet Sounds. That’s why I have such large arrangements in my early songs. It was not really something that was connected to me, but rather to that record, so it was quite interesting about the history of that."

"I was doing an assistant editor job in Prague for three months, and I brought with me about fifteen Bergman DVDs. Bizarrely, I was working on Shanghai Knights with Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson during the day and coming home to Persona in the evening. It was not necessarily good for my state of mind, but it was an amazing cinematic education. It’s virtually impossible to choose a favorite from his films, so I’ll choose two. I do think, though, that Cries and Whispers sums up what it means to be human—the moment when Agnes screams out in agony to her sisters as they stand by her deathbed “Can anyone help me?” and of course they can’t, or they won’t. Holy fuck."