"I do this playlist on Spotify [Ben Watt's Spincycle] and I stumbled across Gem Roses while doing it. My daughter was 15, 16 at the time, and she wandered into the room when I was playing this, and she suddenly stopped short. "Dad! This is Gem Club!" And I was all, "Yes! Yes it is." It was a really touching moment – this obscure band from Boston crossing over from a teenager to her old dad. We've always been hesitant about imposing music on the kids. When the girls were about seven, we showed them a video of us on Top of the Pops. They burst into tears. They couldn't cope with it. It was outside their comprehension. To them, we're just mum and dad. 
This record is very tender, beautiful and diaphanous. The music hovers, almost. It reminds me of Anthony and the Johnsons and The Antlers, and Christopher Barnes' voice is beautiful. There's a song about a doomed gay relationship, and you feel this different worldview being exposed to you in this very beautiful way. Gem Club supported me a few years ago, and I loved hearing them live. There's a quiet defiance to them, this outsider melancholy, that's hard to resist."

"This is a bit of a sidestep, but in 1987 I went to the States on a Camp America. Me and my mate applied and we got in and he went to work in this really posh Jewish camp in Massachusetts somewhere, with all these lovely kids. I was working with these underprivileged kids from The Bronx, in Carmel in upstate New York. These kids were rough. I was 18 and they were like 12 and some of them were bigger than me. I shared a cabin with a guy called Daryl who was from New York. He just played the Run–D.M.C. album all day. Bigger And Deffer was out then too, the LL Cool J album. I just loved it. That was when I got into hip-hop. I wasn't sold on the music. I always thought it was a bit lumpy, before Public Enemy came out. It was missing a groove really. But 'It's Tricky' is really uptempo. It's really aggressive, which I liked. It's got that 'My Sharona' riff and that's not going to send you wrong is it? It sounded great in the house. It sounded so alien. My mum and dad didn't want to know and when you're that age you want to be freaking out the straights."