"Hair is a really cool musical. It's about the late 60s’ hippie movement in America - tribal love, peace 'n' love 'n' rock 'n' roll, people tripping on LSD and expanding their consciousness, all of these concepts that came about in the late 60s’. It's one of my favourite periods in music and in the arts, it was sort of our American renaissance right around then and lot of incredible music came from that time. “I'm an Aquarius; that's my zodiac sign. I think the song is talking about the Age of Aquarius, which was starting around that time, which was said to be a time of enlightenment. It's such a cool song, it has a great melody and I've always loved it. “I ended up doing a production of Hair out in Germany when I was about 22. Personally, it was such an eye opener, I was pretty green when I went out there, but not so green when I left. I was doing a lot of things for the first time and experiencing a lot of things for the first time. “It was a bit of an awakening for me - artistically and personally - with fashion and with sexuality and with all these different things. It was a big transformative moment for me and this song always reminds me of that time.”"

"I still listen to ‘If You Want Me To Stay’ with great pleasure, it never diminishes. I first heard it when it came out, or close to it; I think I was 9 years old or roughly there. Somebody had the single of it in the neighborhood where I was living, which was Connecticut at the time. I liked it, but then over the years whenever I would hear it I kept liking it more and more and more. “It was the overall thing, I think it’s his phrasing, it's so wild and so groovy - I’m trying not to say the word 'funky', but it is! It's his vocal delivery and how he’s singing, Sly Stone had these little jumps or big jumps going way up high or dropping way down low. It’s kind of crazy, but it’s all making sense. And that bass line is such a hook, it’s the whole way through. The whole tune starts off with that bass playing a beautiful, very melodic and funky groovy line. “I love this song. It was probably my first time hearing music like that, and to me it’s still one of the greatest tracks, the bass line on it, just the way he sings it and the song itself. It’s still one that I’ll put on sometimes late at night. I love everything about it"

"Me and James were obsessed with the NME ‘100 Best Albums Of All Time’ in the mid 80s, so we started buying as many as we could - Marquee Moon, Blonde On Blonde, The Clash... some of them we had anyway, but then there were things like Pet Sounds, which was really high, and when you’re 14 you think of the Beach Boys as fucking idiots going “doo wop”, don’t you? We both got What’s Going On and I think it’s the first time I realised, in an exotic way, that politics could translate. Through colour, through country - you could still feel the desperation of someone else even though it was your first exposure to music like that. Obviously my Mum and Dad had tons of records, but the intimacy of playing that in your bedroom and being transported to another world of the same anger you were feeling, but then in such a graceful way. ‘Inner City Blues’, the title track, ‘Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)’. There’s lot’s of brackets - lot’s of songs with brackets. I love that idea of brackets. I love the cover. You can still put it on today, and obviously in the studio we have lots of vinyl and a record player - you put that one in particular and it drifts, it seduces you but it also stimulates."