"Like a lot of people of my generation, the first time I heard a Kurt Weill song was The Doors. You go half a lifetime without realising it was written by Brecht and Weill. Recently I went on a journey. I write songs with a guy called Reid Paley. He’s a very less is more, economical songwriter and you know there’s something about him that’s very tin pan alley. He wears a black jacket and a white shirt and has no problem banging out a song. He is not going to use a word like ‘thalossocracy’ in one of his songs. I felt I needed to get into the feel of Threepenny Opera - how has it survived all these years and spawned all these cover versions which are part of the jazz songbook? I really needed to educate myself and listen to that record ten or twenty times to hear the melody and the meter and the drama, what they put together, those dudes back in pre-WW2 Berlin. They were working really hard and we’re still talking about those records today. I was just enjoying it in and my wife was listening along upstairs. She was doing laundry and I was doing pots and pans. And she said: “I could listen to this all day long, whatever it is.” I don’t speak German so I’m missing a lot outside the English part of the libretto but I still love it."

"Here's a band that's influenced anyone who's ever heard them - including me! They were the teenage band that pulled you out of the muck of post-puberty. It made sense in a J. D. Salinger kind of way. Confronting the world, kicking against the pricks, all those sort of motifs that you get with teenage years. The Chameleons were the band that organised your attack through the crap that was going on around you. Here's a story: when we first came over in '89, I thought The Chameleons were so massive. So I thought I'd ask people, ""Hey, when are The Chameleons playing Wembley? We're here, I want to see them!"" And they'd say, ""Never heard of them mate."" So I'd be like, ""No, no, no, The Chameleons, y'know, Script Of The Bridge?"" I'd just keep asking what enormo-dome they would be playing. And I could not believe how small a cult following they had - I was stunned to hear that this band didn't have such a wide following. In my view this band was bigger than Pink Floyd. I'm now friends with Mark Burgess and have been for 30 years. I'm always marveled by the stories that he tells me from the twists and turns of the band to how they could've been big but weren't. Script Of The Bridge is one of those lingering drones in music that's always been in the background."