"The reason I love this record, apart from it being an absolutely incredible record, is that up until hearing Marquee Moon I wrote songs on my own and when it came to putting things together with a band, I would always have in my mind that I would play chords and then break for a solo and then have some more chords. A friend of mine who is a great guitarist himself asked me whether I had heard a song called 'Marquee Moon' and suggested we try learning the guitar parts together. We sat down like teenagers and tried to learn them. I suddenly realised that you can have loops of really intricate riffs – it doesn't have to be just chords and solos. So, Marquee Moon changed my attitude to arranging - in terms of the guitars - a song. But then, weirdly, after that the track 'Marquee Moon' began to haunt me out. I had some gigs in Australia and Brazil and I figured out that if the record company gave me a round-the-world ticket it would be cheaper for them and also mean I could go to places like Thailand and Chile in between the tour. And every single place I went I would hear the track 'Marquee Moon' being played on local radio stations. It started to become really, really creepy. So, when I came back from the tour I thought I better buy the bloody record as it was haunting me. I found it for a quid in a charity shop as if everything was lining up for me to listen to this record in its entirety. And I did, thankfully, and it has just really changed my attitude to playing guitar and how I could structure things differently in terms of guitar playing."

"I dropped out of university because the band was starting to be quite busy and my friend Daniel Stone, who was an artist, made me a mix CD. It had a different Daniel Johnson song called “Speeding Motorcycle” and when I heard it, I went down a Daniel Johnston rabbit hole. I’ve been down there ever since. “Johnston taught me a lot of lessons. When we started the band, I was the drummer, which was my first instrument, but when the lead singer left I reluctantly took over lead vocals. I really hated the sound of my voice and it's taken me many years to get comfortable with it. ""Johnston was the first artist I heard who really sang in his own voice, he had this really squeaky teenagers warble. It sounds like a kid lost in his own world, in a basement, pouring his heart out into a tape recorder. It had such a profound influence on me.When I discovered his music, between Making Dens and Twenty One, I felt that it was okay to not like your own voice, and it was okay that I’m not Morrissey or Thom Yorke - the people I was trying to emulate at that time. ""Discovering his music taught me that but it also taught me to sing your own truth, to tell your own story, and to not be afraid of revealing your ugliest and most private parts of yourself in your music, because that’s actually how people relate to songs. “A song is a place to hide your ghosts. When you write a song, you’re building a house for your demons to live in. I think Johnston taught me that too. Maybe with A Billion Heartbeats I’ve built a house for a generation’s ghosts, but I’ll have to let other people decide that"