"One of the nice things about being on EMI at the beginning of the 80s was they basically let you come in and get as many records as you liked. So I got an awful lot of classical records and worked my way through them. There's only so many things on the contemporary catalogue that were that interesting. You could get a Wire record. You could get this and that, but a lot of that stuff wasn't that interesting. Obviously, being a requiem, this is music for the dead. It's late 19th century, incredibly dynamic. I guess you'd say post-Beethoven, but more romantic, quite emotional. It goes from very, very simple, quiet, plain solo voice and it builds into this huge thing. It draws you in and completely absorbs you. It's like sailing on the sea. There are quiet bits where everything's still and then some storm comes and everything breaks into a furious tempest. It's something that I've been listening to for 30 years. It's something that I'll often play when I'm going to bed, weirdly."

"This was a component of my youth, really, it harks back to the stuff that would be played here, all those albums I dearly loved. The idea of Sly, that’s it. This dude that just soaked everything up, switched it all around to his advantage, just channelled all the shit that was going on, all this energy. He was really handsome anyway, but he channelled it all into himself. Imagine seeing that for the first time, imagine seeing him leaping out of nowhere. All these albums are quite punky in a way. Even though there’s a lot of maths going on, a lot of overplaying they’re all fucked up, weird people on PCP. The best biography I’ve ever read is Sly’s, its just a diary of everyone accounting for what happened over two years. Towards the end it’s him just getting rid of everyone slowly cos he’s going so nuts, and he’s got a Pitbull terrier called Gun that bites everyone that comes into the room while he’s sat there smoking angel dust."

"I bought this at university, mainly because of the cover art, I admit. I had a very small record collection then. You did in those days, and because you didn't have a lot, you'd play every record again and again. My dad, Tom, was a bandleader, so there was a lot of jazz in the house. He liked people like Count Basie and Woody Herman, but he stopped at Coltrane. He found the modernism of it difficult, but I loved it. It felt like a big thing for me, when I was a precocious teenager. The first jazz I had found for myself!

This is a real fork-in-the-road album for jazz, too, from 1958, a proper boundary between hard bop and the future. The three-part horn arrangements are something I tried to emulate on the first track of [Everything But The Girl's 1984 album] Each And Every One, too – in my own way of course. The album was only his second, and him early on as a session leader. There's so much life in it, and so many ideas. 
"