"This reminds me of that lonely summer in between comprehensive and college, where you see people everywhere with girlfriends, and learning how to drive, and you don’t feel as if you’re going anywhere yourself. “Up in the morning and out to school…” It sounds a bit adolescent, but sometimes the songs that really affect you are the ones that mainline into your soul as a teenager. It gave me some hope. This song made me feel like I could take on the world to a certain degree. We’d written our first song in 1985 and hearing this made me realise: “Wow, you can write a song with quite basic ingredients.” And regardless of any tinpot history that we may have with Mr Bragg, I’ll always be grateful to him for this song."

"The Sweet Smell of Success is, I think, one of the best — certainly one of the greatest New York films, for me — ever made. Alexander Mackendrick, great director. Unbelievable script. James Wong Howe, unbelievable camerawork. And Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster — to see those two going at it, and really, you know, the tragedy of corruption and how it infiltrates every aspect of peoples’ lives. There was something so deeply dark and cynical about it. But yeah, there’s this sort of tiny little germ of hope at the end of the film, as Susan walks off with the musician boyfriend that Hunsecker has tried to destroy, and you just feel like, you know, absolute power corrupts but not totally. Still, it has a vicious sting to it, that film. It really affected me."