"""The first one would be Lindsay Anderson’s If… It’s a film that I love because it allows me sometimes try and explain what it was like to be a kid at an English Public School — I was a scholarship boy in the early 1970s — late ’60s where you were in — even though it’s set earlier than that and was made earlier than that — you were in a culture that hasn’t changed. I remember just watching it and suddenly feeling understood. Which was a completely new one for me. I’d be, you know, This is my world. It was like, OK, here is something Malcolm McDowell–starring, the idea of kids — while we didn’t actually shoot up the school in rebellion, it was the kind of strange stuffy environment that needed to come tumbling down, and I’d never seen that before depicted on film. For years I wondered about why some sequences were in black and white, and many years later I was reading an interview with Lindsey Anderson and discovered it was because they ran out of money for color film, so they just went over to black and white stock, which works in several places through the story."""

"This reminds me of recording at Sawmills Studios at Fowey in Cornwall. It was a really beautiful environment and, thanks to the estuary, you had to come over by boat, loading the gear on depending on whether the tide was in. Then once you arrived it was this cut-off, really beautiful house. It felt like a holiday camp. Those first days in the studio were so exciting, we almost couldn’t contain ourselves. We were desperate to get in and start setting stuff up. We’d done a lot of four-track demos in the living room of the cottages so we kind of knew what we were doing but it was a very free time. I remember Danny and I being in the main living area there and getting really hooked on Either/Or. I think it was his almost Beatles-like sensibility in terms of his melodies and song structure. The technical side of things always interests me and I saw him doing similar things: finding a way to play four chords in a slightly odd way. His stuff wouldn’t always land on the chord that you expect, which was cool and very inspiring."