"There's a reason that I left this one for last. I put it in this position because it seemed like the natural conclusion to this collection of songs. It's the climax, it's the one that gathers everything up and then sums everything up emotionally. It's the finale - everything's building up to this moment. There's centuries of pain, tragedy and - again - loss in his voice, it's undeniable. “The lyrics are based around one extremely simple metaphor, but so much that's good in art, whether we're talking about visual art or songwriting or performance art or literature or poetry, so much that's truly powerful takes one easily understood idea and then brings depth to it. That's what's happening here - it's a metaphor that you instantly understand. It's like looking at a Picasso painting; you're immediately struck by the image, but there's so much more going on beneath the surface. You can listen to it hundreds of times and not feel as if you've exhausted its emotional content. “We were talking about Trish Keenan earlier, but she seems like one of the exceptions to the rule I subscribe to, which is that you should be able to understand everything purely from the performance and the lyrics. You shouldn't need to know anything about the artist's personal life. Paul Robeson was this gargantuan figure of the twentieth century; there was that intelligence, integrity and, for the most part, nobility to him, going as he did from singer to actor to petitioning the President of the United States, but you wouldn't even have to know the slightest thing about him, and you'd still have that instant reaction to this song; there's so much emotional power to it. “I don't know how I'd deal with life if I didn't have music like this - to help me go through it, and to help me understand it.”"

"I was never that big a U2 fan actually! The others, especially Dominic [Scott] who left before we got a record deal, were massive fans. He was a great guitarist - I think Keane would be a really different animal had Dominic stayed with us, he’s a brilliant guitarist. He basically just played a bit like The Edge meets Jonny Greenwood. And the others would harp on about U2, I was a bit younger and I was still into the Beatles and Queen, but Achtung Baby, of all of their records, is my favourite. It’s quite exposed, I suppose. I think that The Edge was getting divorced when they wrote that record and a lot of the songs were trying to make sense of that mess. But my favourite U2 song is 'Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses' and it’s really weird because that has the best middle eight that has ever been written - it might even be like 32 bars long! It’s a total heart-stopping moment, it’s vintage U2, it drops down with Bono doing his posturing, rock star thing, and then it builds and builds and launches into that great chorus. It’s classic U2, all quite pretentious. One of my problems with U2 is that it can sometimes smack of bad school poetry from time to time! I remember someone saying to me, “Oh that line about playing Jesus to the lepers in your head was the greatest line every written in a pop song!”. That’s the fucking lamest line I’ve ever heard! We met Steve Lillywhite when we signed our record deal, he produced that song, and we were saying, "Tell us about 'Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses'", and he was like, “Oh, I’ve got nothing but bad memories about that song! We couldn’t ever get it to work!”"