"I wasn't sure if I should put this song in, I was wondering if I should make weirder choices but then I was just like "fuck it!" It's one of the best songs ever, I go back to it again and again and again, and it always feels so good. There's something so satisfying about it – the way the chords change and the meaning of the lyrics. Isn't it about the Kinks' manager hooking up with a girl who was actually a guy dressed as a girl? It's such a cool thing to write a song about, but it's really subtle. Unless you listen carefully, you don't really notice that that's what it's about. I love songs that have a secret meaning. It's so simple, but so satisfying. It's also a very beautifully written song with the way the melodies go and the way the key changes. But because it's the Kinks it has this really cool ugly, rough sound that makes it feel so much cooler. The best songs are the ones that are beautifully written, but recorded in a dirty way. I'm always looking for ways to make our songs more interesting. If you just play all the chords and everything is perfectly in tune and in time, the music is whitewashed and comes out as a straight line. It's boring. Soph and I are always faffing around with guitar parts and trying to find ways to make them less in tune, or less pretty. You can have the most basic song, but if you cover it in stuff that's a little bit discordant or a little bit weird it makes it all so much more interesting. I couldn't really say when I first heard ‘Lola’. It's one of those ones where you're just born and you know it. I didn't go and buy it in a second-hand shop or anything like that. I don't know where that came from, I don't even know when that started but I've got a few Kinks records and I really love them. I got a big record dump from one of my best friend's dads when I was a teenager. He's been really influential actually, he gave me so much music. My music collection was just there suddenly, a big stack. There was loads of Motown stuff like Smokey Robinson, The Temptations, The Supremes and Marvin Gaye. He used to be a Northern Soul DJ in Yorkshire or somewhere and he's just a cool dude – maybe I first heard the Kinks because of him."

"These were the two albums that introduced me to jazz. I knew bits and bobs but my dad was not really interested in jazz, it was never played in the house. Never heard it much on the radio. Eventually a girlfriend of mine at the time, when I was at Manchester Polytechnic, she played the Art Tatum album because her father had the Art Tatum Group Masterpieces. It's a beautiful album, it's so beautifully recorded, it represents an era before Miles, it's like jazz before Kind of Blue, it has that feeling of being slightly more traditional. But at the same time you can see the seeds of modernity within the recording, the extraordinary dexterity of Art Tatum. And once again, the engineering on these jazz records at that time is quite brilliant. I still listen to this album in its entirety. I love Ben Webster's tone. There's something very sensual about this recording. Just a beautiful thing to listen to. Kind of Blue was next on the list of the albums that I bought. And what I love about Kind Of Blue is the completeness of it. You get such joy; in a way the CD was better, because you didn't have to get up and go over to the deck and turn it over to side two, you just played it all the way through. This has been an influence on me in my attitude towards the band, and being in a band, and having a band, and what I had to face as I went through the Simply Red process. Because I realised that jazz musicians and reggae musicians and soul musicians, they don't have this peculiar . . . and I think part of it's evolved from British music journalism, actually . . . this notion that these guys in the band have to be effectively married, and there's some kind of sin created if one of them leaves or someone else comes in; it's like a national scandal, and everybody's in trauma that somebody leaves. With Miles Davis' career, he cleverly and naturally evolved over a period of years, choosing some of the greatest musicians that ever walked on the face of the earth. That again is one of the great things about Kind Of Blue – the fact you have Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans and John Coltrane, and Miles Davis on the record, and I think it's Jimmy Cobb on drums, Paul Chambers on bass. When I emerged as the only writer of the songs in Simply Red, it dawned on me and my management that we didn't have to be like the Beatles, and that you could say, “If this isn't working out, find another musician that's got talent, just keep moving.” Because I had that problem: I didn't have my second guy. John had his Paul and Mick had his Keith and Bono had his Edge, and that didn't happen to me, there was nobody else writing. And so when I saw jazz and the fluidity of Miles Davis, I thought, what's wrong with that? If there's nobody else writing, then bring other people in as the thing evolves. One of my great musical memories and moments was being at the Grammy Awards in, I think it was 1987, and I was talking to a very pretty girl backstage, and Miles Davis walked by, and I just froze because I was so thrilled to be in the space of my great hero. Then he stopped, and turned round, and came up to me and went [an excellent impression of Davis's hissing rasp] “Simply Red, right?” And I nodded in silence. You know, I'd been on the dole for four years, I'd just become famous in a matter of months, and there I am at the Grammys and Miles Davis knows who I am. He said, “I love that album, Picture Book, man!” And then just strolled off to the toilets. I was left completely stunned. You know, that, one, he even knew who was – and that he liked my album. It was an incredible thrill. I've never forgotten it."