"I’d always quite liked Leonard Cohen, but when he died we’d just started making this record and that sent me into a deep Cohen shaped hole. It also came at a time where I felt quite lost as a songwriter and we were still trying to figure out what we wanted to do with this record. “That was about eighteen months ago and he really helped me to rediscover my voice I think. He reminded me how important it is to be yourself - to be cynical, to be dark, to try and be sexy, to put all of yourself into what you do, to be idiosyncratic, unique and personal in your approach to songwriting. I was in the midst of trying to write about quite universal themes and attempt to be as universal as possible and I think I maybe lost my way a bit, but he helped me to rediscover things. “He’s just so clever as well. If you’ve got a broken heart the second verse in ‘Take This Waltz’ is so good, I love how he can take a really simple sentence, switch out one word and completely flip the meaning; “There's a concert hall in Vienna where your mouth had a thousand reviews”, that’s so evocative and he does that all the time. For this record it got me into the habit of writing entire songs before the music, I’d write an entire lyric before I had any melody, which is actually what I used to do when I was eighteen. Then I could try and focus on trying to be funny, cynical and as honest and personal as possible. “I guess it’s like the difference between a book and a film isn’t it? People often ask me why I don’t like poetry or read it and it’s because I find it really hard to bring it to life, I’d much rather listen. A lot of my friends say ‘you’re so obsessed with lyrics, why aren’t you interested in poetry?’ but for me they don’t really come to life off the page. Leonard Cohen is a poet, but its poetry set to music and he brings it to life. For me, he’s more relatable and easier to connect with than Bob Dylan, you know what he’s talking about, but he does it in a very clever way. “I chose this song because I had a broken heart when he died. I was almost listening to it as poetry more than a song and actually it’s not my favourite song of his, but in the second and third verses, he talks about people being sentenced to death by the blues and it’s really evocative. I’m sure I wrote ‘Young American’ because of him, that was the first song I wrote for the record and that was lyrics first and then put to music, because of verses like that. I was trying to be naked in my approach to lyrics"

"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."