"I grew up with Oumou Sangaré's music. Oumou is the youngest icon that we have that the world knows. She's the one that really took this tradition to the world. I'm very proud of her because I'm following what she started. It's important to share what we have - our culture, and the image of a female on stage. She's beautiful, so elegant, and also has such a great voice. She sings deeply and in a traditional style, and to reach the world with this style of music, it wasn't easy. The fact that she's singing in Bambara, and also using this traditional instrument - which is the Kamele Ngoni - maybe she wouldn't be understood. But she did it. So today we follow the same path. Because after her you don't have any doubt, you know that it's possible."

"Prince is just one of my absolute, all-time favourite artists. He was a genius. I remember the first time I heard ‘Kiss’ and it's so special, because it's so minimal. It's so intimate and it just grabs you. He's singing so quietly and he's got so much space in between all of his little phrases. It's just so good! “It's a style all of his own and he made that sound his. It's one of those songs where it's become so iconic, and that style has been so distinct; so many people have been inspired by it and you can hear it in their music! I think it's just a great touchstone. For me as an artist, and as a singer, and as a music lover, just hearing that song for the first time, it's such a fundamental song."

"I saw Tinariwen by accident at the Cambridge Folk Festival some time in my early 20s. I had a massive hangover, so went to sit in the artists' bit at Cambridge, this bit on the side of the stage where you can see the bands play. I wasn't really paying attention to start with – it was a bad hangover– but slowly but surely this amazing this happened. I was draw in, then hooked in, then totally hypnotised by this music that crashed over me in my little fog. The music had so much forward momentum, and the guitars had so much space, it was like I was being taken off somewhere. It was the most transcendental experience. I love the textural stuff on this record especially – the different types of percussion, the clapping, the chorus singing. The whole thing ebbs and flows. 

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"Yes, that's the one. I know both recordings, and the movie too, but I think the one I listened to mostly was the later one. In a lot of ways Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, and this piece in particular, represent what I'd ultimately like to do as an artist: bringing opera together with popular music; classical singing with everyday life. I've written a couple of operas, I've worked with Shakespeare's sonnets, I've made pop records, and I have this folk background, and I feel that Kurt Weill with The Threepenny Opera was the pinnacle where all of the elements that he was influenced by joined together to create this other animal. Lotte Lenya was the one who interpreted that. It's a really good touchstone to keep in mind in terms of what I do in the pop world and the theatre world."

"That was the last record I bought, basically. It's taking psychedelic rock, some of it's bar room rock playing the same riff over and over again, but something about that repetition turns it into a more psychedelic experience. He kind of sings, but as far I can make out he's not actually singing any words, he's just making these growling sounds. It's got all the ingredients that would be in a Leonard Skynyrd song or something, but just as it becomes too much or is repeated too often, he boils it down to the bare bones of it, and there's something really interesting about that. Again, you can just kind of go off on one. You can tell that there's no smirking involved, you can tell it's the kind of music they like to get into a headspace. It takes you somewhere. 
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"Set in Reykjavík at the turn of the 20th century this novel has a Chaplin-esque quality in its celebration of how the good values of society are to be found among those clinging to its lowest rung. Álfgrímur is an orphan living with an old couple who have opened their small farm to the misfits and the meek. A nearby graveyard becomes the boy’s playground, and it is there he is discovered to have “the pure tone” while singing at funerals of the lost and lonesome. From their gravesides he goes into the world to become a singer. It is my favorite book by Laxness, not least because it is his attempt to understand why someone like himself, born in a town of 10,000 people, found the right melody to transform the stories of a small world into world literature."