"Rick Rubin embraced Johnny Cash when he was floundering without a label. Rick thought this was unthinkable. He started soliciting writers beyond the country community and they did two great, odd, dark records. I wound up writing a song called 'I Witnessed A Crime' without knowing that Rick was going in this more contemporary vein. I later discovered it was too mid-’50s; too perfect for old-school Johnny Cash. So it didn't reach release until it was bootlegged out of the studio and found its way to YouTube. 

Rick called me up – I live just walking distance from house-to-house: ""Can you come over?"" I said, ""Well, you still got that old Fender guitar down there? If you let me play it I'll come on down."" He had this stunning Fender Esquire from 1954. I walked down and the door opened up, he ushered me into the living room and sitting on the sofa was Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. I was dumbfounded. So we sat down this close and he said, ""I like that song."" June started welling up and said, ""Ooh, you played the solo just like Luther Perkins."" I said, “Well, I'd like you to help me get through it.” We wound up singing it across the table. Little did I know that Rick had hidden microphones, capturing the whole thing."

"Ooh! Oooh! It's almost like [an album] that's never been repeated. Bryan Ferry has come close but it was a moment in time for them as a band. It could have been a nightmare to make for all I know but it's beautiful and incredible. At the time I was listening to that, I was getting into the sounds of records and perceiving how they were made and the depth in that record is incredible. Bob Clearmountain mixed it and I wondered [at the time]: what does a mixer do? And then you start to realise 'ah – that's what he does'. The main difference between my hits later in the 1980s and a record like this is that the musicianship on Avalon is pretty amazing. They could choose anyone to play on their records as could Bryan Ferry afterwards. And the nucleus of what their band was pretty amazing itself. Their understanding of what you could get out of a studio was incredible. My records with Stock, Aiken and Waterman are [comparatively] quite narrow. SAW had a bunch of keyboards but not many, maybe two or three they really liked. A Yamaha DX7, Jupiter 8 and the Linn 9000 were their workhorses. They had their little set up and that was the band. Mike and Matt were the two musicians. Matt was an amazing guitar player but he never put that to the front because it wasn't needed. He was a Ringo guitar player - he didn't do anything that wasn't needed! They were all about trying to write and produce hits for the Top 40. No – the top 5! That's all they were bothered about. They didn't do anything that was surplus to requirements. But they also made some crap records that nobody heard! But they found their formula and stuck to it like their Motown heroes. It never seemed cynical to me because they were honest about it. They weren't trying to be cool. They did go out and accept awards but generally speaking, they turned up in jeans and t-shirts – well, Pete was slightly different because he was A&R and the mouthpiece – because they viewed it as work. I met Lamont Dozier once and he said 'I get up, go into my basement, sit at the piano, press play and record and sit there for two hours. Then I come up, have breakfast, answer my mail, do whatever I do, and I go and listen it afterwards, find the good bits and say 'that's a song''. So it's quite workmanlike in a way. I don't think anybody would belittle anything Motown did. But if you want to put a negative slant on it, it's a factory style of doing things. But I also think: that's bollocks. If you're gonna be good at something, you have to put the hours in."

"When we signed our record deal in America, it was a really exciting time and I remember going over there and, at that point, they were basically doing anything to sign us! We went to Interscope Records. We had no money that that point, we were struggling musicians and this woman just opened up this kind of cabinet that was full of every record that Interscope had put out and the one that she chose was Sea Change, saying, “You should listen to this one, it’s only just come out”. And I’d never really been into Beck, I’d just found it sort of contrived but it completely changed my perspective of him. It was just when I met my girlfriend at the time, who’s now my wife. Sea Change is a break-up album but we fell in love to this break-up album, it was the soundtrack to our car journeys at the time. It was really peculiar; normally an album reflects where you are at the time and whenever I hear the songs from it, I’m transported back to this really happy time when we were getting together. That’s what I like about it, because it’s so bare, from what I remember he wrote it just after splitting up from his long-term partner. Trying to convey the misery of such a messy break-up in such a direct way, I was just blown away by that."

"This is such a great record, and it's so overlooked. It's sneered on, too. It's got some really great jazz musicians on it, doing such brilliant, subtle performances. And the lyrics are fantastic. Listen to 'I'd Do It For Your Love': "The sting of reason/The splash of tears/The Northern and the Southern Hemispheres/Love emerges and it disappears." How great is that? 

This record was played a lot when I was growing up, so it's one of those records I've taken with me. I also love the story of what Paul Simon said when it won the Grammy for Best Album: "I'd just like to thank Stevie Wonder for not releasing anything this year."