"My son Ben went to Elliot School, which is quite famous for producing musicians. The first one that I knew was Kieran Hebden, who makes music as Four Tet. There was a culture at one point that was encouraging people. Ben was in the same class as the xx’s Romy [Madley-Croft] and he knew Jamie [Smith] quite well, and I knew his parents. We even went to their holiday house in Norfolk. The xx were the shy ones, they were like a little gang. Jamie was the most outgoing one, and he was pretty shy. I knew quite a lot about how that record happened, that they tried first with a producer and then did it in a house studio. We were living just down the road from where that was going on."

"I get all the Queen records mixed up because there are so many neat songs but there never was, in my opinion, a consistent groove to one of the records where you could clearly identify a distinct period during those first few. But the operatic approach to Queen totally changed how I viewed heavy rock and I still think that Brian May was ahead of his time with his weird picking, guitar tones and harmonies. Of the later Queen material, I was listening to 'Who Wants To Live Forever' the other day and Freddie's voice – every time I hear it, my eyes fill up. It's so incredibly emotional and that's what we, as musicians, want to elicit from the listener. Freddie and Queen were such a huge part of my life."