"I do this playlist on Spotify [Ben Watt's Spincycle] and I stumbled across Gem Roses while doing it. My daughter was 15, 16 at the time, and she wandered into the room when I was playing this, and she suddenly stopped short. "Dad! This is Gem Club!" And I was all, "Yes! Yes it is." It was a really touching moment – this obscure band from Boston crossing over from a teenager to her old dad. We've always been hesitant about imposing music on the kids. When the girls were about seven, we showed them a video of us on Top of the Pops. They burst into tears. They couldn't cope with it. It was outside their comprehension. To them, we're just mum and dad. 
This record is very tender, beautiful and diaphanous. The music hovers, almost. It reminds me of Anthony and the Johnsons and The Antlers, and Christopher Barnes' voice is beautiful. There's a song about a doomed gay relationship, and you feel this different worldview being exposed to you in this very beautiful way. Gem Club supported me a few years ago, and I loved hearing them live. There's a quiet defiance to them, this outsider melancholy, that's hard to resist."

"""I got my first guitar when I was seven; actually, it was a ukulele, but at the time it was big enough to be a full-size guitar. When I was nine I got a three-quarter size nylon, six-string guitar and with it I had a little beginner’s guide guitar book, which I still have. I went through that and within ten minutes I could play E minor, A7 - you know, some simple chords. “Then I was at a car boot sale and we found an Elvis chord book and ‘Love Me Tender’ was in it. I was familiar with it, but it was the first song that I fully learned and the first song that I knew the melody well enough to be able to figure out if I was playing the guitar chords wrong or right. “It was a real catalyst of a song for making me use my ear; in terms of working out what I was actually hearing and then sussing out chord shapes to go along with the melody. I still love playing the song, just very softly. And I still have the Elvis book but it all fell apart, so it’s in a ring-binder now with plastic sleeves that you’d get at school."