"This was a record I got in my youth; I was really, really young. My sister had previously turned me on to a lot of different music but this was the beginning of my own branching out. I was starting to get my own identity. I had gotten a few weird records of my own and one of them was KISS's Hotter Than Hell and this one came shortly afterwards. What a lot of people missed with Bowie was that he really knew how to jam on an acoustic. They were great pop rock songs but were mostly played on an acoustic. Of course he had a great lead guitar player in Mick Ronson and when you can mix that up with acoustic playing, then you've got something really cool. I have learned some of his songs and it may not be that the chord progressions are unusual, as some people say, but it's the exotic chord choices that make the music weird. Some of those chords always make me think of a dog when he turns his head sideways and looks at you as if to say, ""Are you going to eat that?"

"This was after a trip to Brazil when I went down there with my mum and my sister and we did some shows. It was an intense moment in my life because Kate had been diagnosed with cancer and her health was pretty precarious. We saw there was a fairly decent run for the next couple of months – the treatment was kind of working and she was feeling relatively okay – so I booked some gigs in Brazil. We proceeded to have one of the most beautiful, decadent, life-affirming trips I ever took in my life, and it was during that little working vacation that I discovered Tim Maia's music, and I've been a fan ever since. He sadly passed away in the 1990s. I love that he represents a real amalgam of so many cultures, as a lot of great Brazilian artists do: African, Spanish, Portuguese, he's just this melting pot of great culture and music and also tremendously individual at the same time. He is certainly well known in large sections of the world, but is a bit of a kept secret in the West."