"I would imagine many babies were conceived to this album. If you think you're a singer or you want to do a bit of singing, it's a must listen album. Even when he's just scatting the lyrics and singing along to a melody – which is the way he apparently used to write a lot of stuff, by just going to the mic and ad libbing – he's amazing. I'm not very interested in politics as a musician – never have been – but he managed to incorporate what was going on in US politics at that time in a highly poetic way. I got to meet him and perform on a show with him at the Motown 25 concert in 1983. That was Marvin's last performance. I did 'Where Did Our Love Go' and Diana Ross came on stage when I was doing it, which was quite an event. She just danced around me and then went off. There was a knock on my dressing room door before the show and I opened the door and he said, ""Hi I'm Marvin Gaye"" and I said, ""I know you are!"" He just came to say thanks for doing the show. He was a really nice guy. And when I came off the stage, him and Smokey Robinson were waiting for me and they put their arms round me and all that. It was nice to meet him; he was such a gentle soul. Berry Gordy's No 2 was a woman called Suzanne de Passe who was the MD of the company and she'd seen my videos and heard my stuff, and Berry liked it. The theme of the show was 'Yesterday, Today, Forever', and he wanted something that was in the future style. I think I performed with all my heroes and heroines that night. I'd been listening to their songs all my life. I had the unenviable task of following Michael Jackson. He sang 'Billie Jean' and did the moonwalk for the first time. I was ten feet away from him when he did that. It was quite a memorable evening."

"This is a project from Ben Wallers and Alastair Mackinven from Country Teasers. We moved in similar circles in the mid-90s. I saw them do the whole of this at the Moth Club earlier this year. You could think 'oh what a funny idea to cover the whole of Pink Floyd's The Wall', but they actually did it really well. I used to be a Pink Floyd fan, and one of the first albums I bought was Dark Side Of The Moon, but The Wall is where I parted company with them, I thought it was just a self-indulgent mess. So I was amazed to go and see that they'd actually made it palatable, they'd done something interesting with it. I know it's not coming from a take the piss point of view, Ben's got an actual affection for that record, and they'd really thought it out. The Wall is one of the most indulgent, over-produced records ever done, and so the idea of two guys on a stage at the Moth Club doing it is like 'how the fuck are you going to do that? Where's the choir, where's all this?' But it worked, it was really good. I preferred their version of The Wall to the Floyd one. I remember going to see the film version of The Wall, and Bob Geldof played the main character, and it was so rubbish and painful, the worst kind of that rock star moaning about nothing in particular. There's something in that record to do with a performer's relationship with an audience that's interesting - there is something strange about getting up on a stage and performing in front of people. In Ben's live performances as The Country Teasers or The Rebel, sometimes people think he's trying to wind the audience up or whatever, but it's always important that the audience is there and you're never allowed to be a passive spectator. I don't know if that's why he finds [this album] an interesting thing to deal with, but you could tell that there's a reason for it, it wasn't just 'let's try and do something ridiculous'. "