"When my eldest was a baby, I'd take her on tour, and this album was an important part of the kit. There'd be a battle after the gigs to get her into the car and I'd be all, "Put Tumble Bee on quick! Put Tumble Bee on before she kicks off!" And then everything would be alright. So I'd like to thank you, Laura, for saving my life a few times [laughs]. 

This is a really wonderful album for children, well-crafted and beautiful, that doesn't dumb things down. I still listen to it now, quite happily, without the kids. Becky and Niopha have babies now, and we had them on tour with us when they were both about six-months-old. That time in my life is very much done, but it was really lovely. I remember Becky standing backstage, and breathing out, going, ‘Oh my God, I'm in a quiet room with a clean dress on'. I remember that feeling too [laughs]."

"I think probably Seven Samurai, by Kurosawa. I think I saw that when I was about 15 or 16 in the cinema. It’s such a big old chunk of a film, and it’s always a treat to sit down with that movie. It’s so perfectly framed, and perfectly judged; it’s basically the blueprint for most action cinema — expect that it’s much more intelligent than most action cinema. There’s characters in it that hardly only get a couple of lines, but you feel that they’re totally fleshed out. The massive battle scene at the end, which should be completely confusing, is instead just completely clear — you never worry about where you are, you never don’t understand what their plan is — and I think that’s something that you rarely see in cinema now. The closest you get to it, sometimes, is I think in James Cameron’s work — where it’s very, very methodically plotted and planned, and you feel the mechanics of everything that’s been very carefully formulated."