"The Deer Hunter’s something I saw when I was very young. I saw a lot of disturbing movies when I was young. Alien, American Werewolf in London. There were a lot of movies that probably kids shouldn’t go to. And it just blew the top of my hair off, you know? The Russian roulette scene. Kind of like the chainsaw scene in Scarface was just really dynamic cinema, you know? Raiders of the Lost Ark is another one. Jaws. You get me going, I can’t stop. But those scenes, they stick in your mind and, yeah, it changed you. I think they kind of change you. Maybe Deer Hunter changed me. It was about friendship. It was about war, but it was also about friendship."

"Classical music reminds me a lot of when I was growing up. I learned violin and trumpet in school, and I sang; my mum listened to classical music a lot, too. All of it I discarded at thirteen, of course, when I became a teenager, as you do. But Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were always there at home. They were this incredible musical wallpaper.

I didn't know Chopin's Nocturnes, though, until my wife introduced me to them about twenty years ago. Because of that, they're very dear to me. This music is properly of the night in its melodies, and the sparseness of its arrangements. The playing by Ashkenazy is incredible, too. It's music that goes straight through you, in the best possible way.
"

"I’m tempted to say Arrival, because I used to stare at the album cover as a kid, but Voulez-Vous was sort of my introduction to proper French. The arrangements on the record are great, and Does Your Mother Know is a fantastic rock song. That riff could have easily been on a T. Rex record. “They were a little ahead of the curve. This record is right before a lot of people started combining disco and rock, and I think ABBA did it rather inadvertently. Beautiful songs, incredible production. Anybody who puts down ABBA is just plain mad. The songs are light and bouncy, but if you listen to the lyrics, there’s a lot of sadness there. Pretty interesting."

"‘Tower of Song’ was another one where the sonic palette influenced us, with this big vocal and not much happening around it - there's nothing to distract you from what he's saying. Lyrics are usually my number one thing, but this is actually the record where for the first time I was being influenced by a lot of the music rather than lyrics. I had that taken care of in my mind or something, it was more about sounds and felling. When I wrote ‘Beautiful Strangers’ I don’t think I’d heard ‘Tower of Song’, but I remember a lot of people comparing the two songs and that led me to that record. It's about creating a minimal sonic palette, where the lyrics are the most important thing."