"Last year I arrived in San Diego at the beginning of a tour, where I was playing the Thick As A Brick material. I ambled down to the theatre in the morning having arrived the night before, where the theatre manager said there was a note for me in my dressing room, left behind by Alfie Boe who they’d had a couple of nights before. I recognised Alfie Boe as a hotshot, super popular opera star who played at the Queen’s Jubilee Concert in Hyde Park. They crop up from time to time, these people who cross over from a more insulated music into wider popular culture, and Alfie Boe has certainly done that in the last couple of years with opera music. You might think he’s just another of the usual not-quite-authentic people who just find themselves singing the odd aria at working men’s clubs, and getting a record deal and a ton of money. But Alfie did his apprenticeship by studying at the Royal Academy of Music, worked with the D’Oyly Carte Opera and spent ten years of his life learning his craft. And he was a man born with enormous natural talent. Rather like Lou Gramm he has this very assured level of control – he knows what he can do. I read his note to me, wishing me a good show and leaving me a phone number. So a few weeks later in England I called Alfie and we had a few chats on the phone, and though we haven’t met we were due on two occasions to have lunch, but he had to cancel because of his mother’s illness. But I hope I do get to meet Alfie because I think he’s a very fine singer. I understand that while his desire is not to leave classical music, he wants to demonstrate he’s got the cojones of a Tom Jones or a Robert Plant or whoever - he wants to be a rock and roll singer. Far be it for me to say that might be mistake, you’ve got to give it a go. So Alfie’s branching out into rather middle-of-the-road pop and rock at the moment. As a classical singer, I think he has the gravitas and vocal expertise, perhaps more vocal expertise, than Pavarotti at his relatively young best. If you listen to Alfie’s ‘Nessun Dorma’, I think you’ll hear something that is sung with enormous technical ability, control, authority and with the right amount of gravitas, it has a weight to it that I think is really great. I hope he doesn’t sell himself short in the realm of middle-of-the-road pop music."

"The Blue Nile was another sort of national treasure that I was drawn to and then thrilled to discover they were local. I can't overestimate what it meant to fall in love with bands from Scotland who enjoyed success. It just opened up windows for our minds, because there's a certain particularly being a 70s baby and London just felt so far away – success of any kind, or glamour, felt far away. Whenever a Scottish band would succeed on a national level it felt really immense. 

 What I also just loved about The Blue Nile was how evocative and sad they sounded. I loved the sorrow in their records, because up until hearing them, I'd hadn't really heard sorrow. I'd heard non-conformity, I'd heard rebelliousness with Siouxsie and the Banshees or The Clash, but I'd not heard sorrow. 

 Depression and sadness have always been a part of my language and my family all sort of thought or considered me a complete freak as a result. They just thought this whole darkness and my gloominess was an annoyance and at best, an irritant. But to me it's always been part of my interfacing with the world. Sorrow, sadness and depression – it's just existed in me and it's part of, I think, human nature. 

 When I heard Blue Nile, I was like, 'Ah, old friend, I recognise you, there you are. Somebody else feels the same as me'. I loved the sort of expansiveness of their sound. It felt very sort of like a modern Frank Sinatra to me, in a way. It's an obvious comparison but the sweeping, Nelson Riddle-esque type of sonic landscapes just really captured my imagination. 
 
 Paul Buchanan's got this ache in his voice that's, again, very unusual. You don't really hear a lot of people sound like Paul. I loved the sort of ordinariness of the lyrics too – it was very much sort of relatable, simple, and unglamorous expressions of love; I just really identified with that. 

 Pop music has always just alienated me for one reason or another – I just don't identify with it or understand it. So somebody like Paul Buchanan and the Blue Nile literally speaks my language. It's a language that isn't often used or utilised in day-to-day culture. I think we're all encouraged to hide our mental health issues, or encouraged to hide our depression, our sadness and our griefs. I believe in the expression of grief: I think it's imperative for a joyful life, and why live if you can't live joyfully? 

 To live joyfully one must express negative emotions. It's really, really important. And those people who shirk from so-called negative expression, I think, are cutting off an entire part of their own happiness and existence."

"I chose Meet The Beatles!, not With The Beatles, it was the first album (released by Capitol) in America. It’s mostly coming from With The Beatles, but I think there’s a few songs on there that are not on Meet The Beatles!. I’ve been talking about Sgt. Pepper and Revolver recently because those records are to the fore in terms of my new record but I chose this one because The Beatles are such an undying, unending influence and that’s the record I heard first. I was very young when it came out but for some reason my father brought it home and he brought home the singles that preceded it on these obscure little labels in America – Vee-Jay Records, Swan Records before Capitol took over, so I have all those records. I always cite Meet The Beatles! because I’m so very happy that, even though I was very young, I was able to experience the arc of The Beatles career in its time rather than coming to it afterwards. When Steve Shelley joined Sonic Youth, he’s a huge Beatles freak and we’d ask “What was your first Beatles record Steve?” and he’d say the red one or the blue one, the two doubles that came out after they dispersed and we’d be like “ok…” It doesn’t really matter where it starts, it’s not like an ‘I’m better than you’ sort of thing, but to have experienced that momentous change in music and culture in our society in its time is a very important thing to me in terms of who I am and how it shaped me. It all really started with that record. Pop music was always on the radio, but that record changed something in me. You never think when you’re a little kid that you’re going to grow up to be a pop musician, you never really think that it’s going to happen for you. But that record changed the things I found important in my life and it just made music such a central obsession and just showed how intelligent that process can be. It can start with something as simple as that record that’s got ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ on it, songs of that ilk, to go through to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘I Am The Walrus’ and all these super sophisticated musical compositions. So just watching that arc gave me a lot of inspiration on a lot of levels and it didn’t even have to be for music it could be for whatever you wanted to do in terms of showing how deeply and committedly you could throw yourselves into the work you were going to do."