"For obvious reasons, since her passing, I’ve been playing it a bit, and it’s a fucking great album. I think it was Tony Bennett who said she had the voice in which he could recognise the echoes of the truly great singers. Again, she had that spontaneity: she could do five different versions of the same song and they’d all be equally good. And that’s the sign of a real soul singer. I did meet her a few times, I used to see her around Camden, and my daughters used to know her a bit, being Camden girls, and it was sad seeing her demise. She was this healthy, vibrant girl and bit by bit you saw that change. Really tragic, and especially when you hear how great that album was. It’s funny, even in our heyday, people in Camden would leave us alone a bit. There wasn’t that tabloid hunger in those days, and there wasn’t a lot of music in the papers. Also, we weren’t in the girly market. Girls didn’t like Madness, so there was no point in writing about us! So we avoided all that. But now of course there’s the internet, and all these fucking virals or whatever they are, and everyone’s got a camera on their phone, and if Amy wanted to go and hang out at the pub, she just couldn’t. And at the very end, all she wanted to do was come back to Camden. Hopefully in time people will remember her as a brilliant singer, and forget all the other nonsense."

"It’s All Coming Back To Me Now’ was on the first CD that I remember buying. I had a little purple plastic CD rack and it was one of the most played on that. I loved the piano and I started playing the piano around that age, so it felt relatable for me. Again, I just loved the drama; it’s like a seven or eight minute long song, it’s so amazing, who does that? No one does that! It took me on such a story, the visuals are so clear, even now I can still feel that intense drama. Celine Dion’s amazing, it’s like watching a movie, honestly, listening to those kinds of songs. “So that was ’96, so I was nine. I was quite a melancholy child. My mum would put me to bed and I’d always get up and walk around upstairs, where there wasn’t really anywhere to walk around. I would just walk around the bathroom, sit at the top of the stairs, hold the staircase and stare out. I really was quite melancholy and I now understand mental health issues as an adult - like I had, you know, anxiety, OCD, depression; I had so much emotion. I mean that was just me as a really morose, melancholy nine year old, I really felt that intensity. “Those emotional songs can be the cloak that you wrap yourself in. I was drawn to the drama of those kinds of songs, definitely. I mean, those are pretty intense sad songs for a little kid."

"Arthur Verocai is interesting. I think that this record came to it came to America at a certain time; a lot of the vinyl doesn't make it around the world from Brazil, and it makes them even more precious because it can be some grand work that may never have seen the light of day. I think this was one of those moments where somebody was like 'this album has to be heard', they pressed it up and made it a point to bring it over to America. The record sounds very much like I can understand what is happening and what is being said, even musically, something about it is bigger than the part where it's in Portuguese. I listened to it relentlessly, I would listen to it back to back to back for years. I still do listen to it that much, and every time I do it feels brand new. I think that this is something that inspired me throughout the years to make music the way that I make music. Arthur Verocai's pretty old now, but every once in a while he comes over to the States and does something special. I think he was brought over to the states for the first time a few years ago, and I was out of town and I'm so sad I missed it. I would have loved nothing more than to get a chance to see Arthur Verocai play live, but sometimes that's how life works."

"I knew and liked David Lean, a director of genius, who was very kind to me when he was making The Sound Barrier for my Uncle Alex, and Brief Encounter has always seemed to me the very best of classic British filmmaking, with its fiercely restrained emotions and good manners trumping passion, typical of its era. It is the best of the “small” British pictures, which my Uncle Alex tried to replace with “big” British pictures in an attempt to outdo Hollywood, rather than coexist with it, after he left it for Britain in 1932. Lean, who in Brief Encounter made this most English of English films (a distinction perhaps shared by This Happy Breed and The Fallen Idol, see below), moved onward and upward to ever bigger pictures, by way of The Sound Barrier, Summertime, and eventually the biggest and best of all epic films, Lawrence of Arabia, escaping from the confines of England to “international” films that challenged and beat those of the Hollywood studios. But Brief Encounter was a perfect, close-up view of a shabby, threadbare England, the England of “books from Boot’s, good drains, and class distinction,” in John Betjeman’s words, and of a muted, sad, doomed, and very English love affair. It has always been a film that puzzles the French, who find it hard to believe in a love story with almost no eroticism, and in which the lovers are usually dressed in raincoats. It is also Trevor Howard, a wonderful actor, at his best."

"I guess I’ll have to start with Songs from the Second Floor, which is a film by Roy Andersson, who is a brilliant Swedish filmmaker who basically… He made a feature in the ’70s called A Swedish Love Story that is a really wonderful, strange, funny, acerbic commentary on Sweden that became this huge hit. I think it was the biggest hit ever in Sweden. And then he delved into making commercials for a long time, and he developed this new style over the course of something like 300, 400, 500 commercials. Then, in the early 2000s, he came out with this film that took him several years to make called Songs from the Second Floor, which is like a parody of obsessive perfectionism. He’s very similar Jacques Tati in that he works primarily with stationary wide shots, and he’s always building sets. All of the sets in his films are built from scratch, and the reason his films take so long to make is because each each vignette is one shot, and the set for that shot tends to take a month to build. There’s just like these gorgeous paintings, and there’s this really singular, dark, dry, sad wit driving everything he does. Since Songs from the Second Floor he’s come out with two other films that play like spiritual sequels, You the Living and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, which I think you can see on Netflix. But Songs from the Second Floor remains the most perfect of the films, in my opinion."

"Grunge was the first kind of music I discovered for myself without my parents. They were not very keen [laughs]. I was fifteen, the perfect age, when Nirvana broke, and I still listen to this record. I still listen to Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden too, but this still feels fresh to me, and has a real power. They captured that anarchy and rebelliousness of youth, but had songs that were like sing-a-longs, which really spoke to me. Plus the rhythms were incredible, like in ‘Breed'. I love the aggression of ‘Breed'. The rhythms of lots of metal, grunge and rock all really get me, actually. Adrian and I quite often used to come out of folk festivals and get into the car and stick Faith No More on. Like a cleanse!

Nirvana were different to the other bands around then because there was such a sad reflectiveness to them. ‘Something In The Way' particularly – Kurt's voice, and the way the song moves. Nirvana also remind me of being at the school disco. I had a friend that DJd at them, and me and my friends would be sitting down at the side, not interested, but he'd let us pick three songs to play. We'd always pick something off this album, get on the dancefloor for three minutes of headbanging, then sit down again [laughs]. I think the songs you loved as a teenager are songs you'll always have an emotional attachment to, as well. You're formed along with them."