"I heard this on the radio in the States, and I loved the songwriting. He was coming up with something different, it was a soulful folk, so I went and bought the album in LA, I thought “I gotta hear what this guy does” and every bloody track on it is a gem. I’ve always loved the sound of an album, maybe as much as the songs themselves, you know the performance, the sound of it makes a big difference to me. And now you know you can get box sets with alternate takes, and you realise then how long it took them sometimes to get the final take. The first time they did it was good, but then all of a sudden - boom - and there it is. I think there’s a good learning process to listen to the ones they didn’t let go, where the producers said “not yet”, and they persevered until... there it is. When I’ve been in a club sometimes, I’ve gotten up [on stage] and they’ve been like, “Do ‘Delilah’!”, and I’ve said “Let me just do this, which I don’t normally do"". So it is, because when you’ve made big records - great onstage, the way you do your own show - but it’s great to do other stuff when you don’t have to do those things. Not that I don’t like them, you know ‘Delilah’’s a great record, but its nice to do other things. So when you hear someone like Bill Withers doing something like that and being successful, you think, “See, there’s room for that.” There’s room for all different kinds of records. They don’t all have to be the same, or in the same vein, or chasing some things just to get a hit record."

"""It’s a cliché, perhaps, but I can’t say this about any other song: I can literally remember the first time I heard ‘Lithium’. I remember being in the room when my sister put it on, almost in the dark and I remember thinking ‘What the hell is this?’ Much like any other kid really. But it properly blew me away in one sitting and that’s never happened since. And with the people in that room, I started a band within a few months. We played together till I was about 17 or 18. “How do you even talk about Nirvana? Everything about them is so perfectly packaged, but in an accidental way - the way they look, the way Kurt sings, the way Dave plays. It’s a ‘lightning strike’ sort of band, and you can’t really copy it, you can’t really take anything from it except attitude. “The lyrics are kind of awful if you actually sit down and go through them, but when you’re 14 they’re absolutely amazing. All of it works really well for a really specific time in your life. It’s absolute dynamite, and still is, I see more Nirvana t-shirts now than I did when I was a kid."""