"Someone made me a mixtape once of a lot of amazing folk and soul and jazz, kind of legendary songs, quite rare, and it had a lot of Pentangle and Fairport Convention and it had 'Compared To What' on it. And I went seeking 'Compared To What' because I thought ""what is that song?"", and that's what inspired the song 'Central Reservation'. It's just an amazing record. Come the last six years, I was just like, ""you know what, the sound of the next record is this record"". One of the reasons is that I love the fact that the drums and bass are ever-present and yet, at the same time, they're almost not there. I can't explain it; it's like all of the elements of the record are perfectly heard but each sound has so much space around it. It's got the most extraordinary rhythm, emotion and beautiful songs. When I started speaking to Tucker Martine [Sugaring Season producer], who produced the album, I said ""okay, here's a blueprint for a sound I love and a record that I love"", and that was it. We weren't being analytical; it gave us a starting place, and from there it grew out. It's just filtered through in different ways."

"I don’t mean this in a derogatory way, but Graham Oliver and Steve Dawson of Saxon were into the bluesy bands - simple but with a lot of groove. But me and Paul Quinn were into more muso bands like Genesis and King Crimson. That was the type of stuff we played, with more jamming and improvisation. As a bass player and singer, my goal was to play like Chris Squire. I used to try and learn the songs – it took me about six months to learn ‘Roundabout’. I‘ve talked to Rick Wakeman about Yes, and he said Jon Anderson would structure melodies like I do it. They would sit in a room and arrange things around the vocals, and we do that because it gives me more freedom to write. I could listen to this all day. NWOBHM bands liked Yes because the musicianship was great - it moves away from blues feel to a jazz feel. A lot of these guys were university trained, but we learned from listening to music. We knew nothing about music theory or scales, but prog rock really made you better as musicians when you learned to play it. It seemed unattainable because it was so good."

"Many of our generation of white, British, middle-class musicians who went to art college all knew about Mose Allison from ‘Parchman Farm’ and one or two other songs in the early Sixties that had been done by British R&B bands. So I knew a little bit about him but I suppose like many people, assumed he was a black guy. He turned out to be a Mississippi white guy with pasty legs and an obvious understanding of jazz and its traditions. He did most of his work in a piano trio with a bass player and a drummer, and he sang in this very laconic and down-home way. I wouldn’t say his songs never touched on romantic lyrics but they were often about stuff. About real life – that’s what gave him credibility and a high level of authenticity, because you knew this wasn’t a guy making it up, this was a guy who had lived the things he sang about. I, like many people of my generation, was struck by his work. The Who recorded at least one of his songs. I expect today there are a few younger musicians who will know about Mose Allison in the same way they will know about Roy Harper."