"This was a song that I'd hear on the radio quite a bit when I was growing up. It wasn't a current song, but it was one of those that had legs, and they just kept on playing it. ""The reason it was on my mind is because I pulled it apart the other day. I do that when I'm trying to get into work mode. I might have been hanging with friends, or dealing with business or talking to my mom, so when I want to switch over to the kind of mindset where I need to be receptive to musical ideas, it sometimes helps me to just play a song that I really love - not one of my own - and pick at it. What are the chords doing here? I'm asking that kind of question. ""I heard the Fugees version - which is what brought it to mind - but the Flack one is my favourite. To get to that place in my head when I'm working, I need to do something physical, like sing and strum the guitar on a track that's not mine and just figure out what makes it tick. So in terms of 'Killing Me Softly', there's this cool trick - this cycle of fifths - where you play a chord, and then go a fifth up, and then another fifth up, and it sounds as if it's going down at the same time. You don't hear that very often, but it's on songs like 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road' and 'You Never Give Me Your Money'. ""At first glance, you might say this is a sad song, because of the tone and approach, but it's not. It's just somewhere to go if you're looking for an emotional experience, because it's pure soul"

"That was from John Peel, where I discovered load of music when I was younger. It was a free album given away with their first album. I remember John Peel didn't really play the proper album, he just played the dub version. I had taped most of the tracks off the radio but I didn't have a copy, and ended up finding it at a market about ten years ago. To me that's like Thatcher Music - it came out about the time that Thatcher came to power and in some ways you can hear that, it's got this cold harshness, like its anticipating the shit that's going to go down, especially the track called 'Paranoia Claustrophobia', it's great but it's pretty dark. I got told off for playing that. In the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher dying you weren't supposed to mention her. I was doing the show at the time, I thought it was a big event and didn't really like the fact that we weren't allowed to mention it. Tony Benn had died a few months earlier and as soon as that happened everyone was going 'loony left' and stuff like that, nobody seemed to take much care about whether they were going to upset his family, but as soon as Margaret Thatcher died it was 'oh don't speak ill of her, have some respect'. So you weren't allowed to play records that referenced her and you weren't supposed to mention her, but I played that Basement Five and said something like 'music from the Thatcher era' and ten minutes later somebody came down and said 'don't say things like that'. Tory governments are always going on about how the BBC is a hotbed of socialism but I got told off for that so I don't think there's much truth in it."