"Obviously we gravitate to those we love, and I suppose the B52's did all the groundwork for the campy disco rock a la Scissor Sisters that followed decades later. They are true originals and may have been the soundtrack to a John Water's movie. I lost count of the amount of times I danced to ‘Rock Lobster’ and tried to learn the who's who list of names on 52 Girls. The brilliant thing about being a pop musician is that you get to meet all of your teen idols. We toured with The B52's and I stayed in Woodstook at Kate Pierson's Lazy Meadow's Silver-line Caravan site, where I consequently felt the drums of an Indian pow wow coming up through the water of the river through my feet (which I often hear on the intro to ‘A Little Respect’ but it isn’t actually part of the music… spooky!"

"It was the mid-'80s, I was in my early teens and Simon & Garfunkel came into play. A lot of the acoustic side to my playing comes from Paul Simon. He’s one of the greatest guitar players that ever lived and he’s done so many seminal guitar parts that I just fucking worship! “I first heard them very early in life because my parents had three Beatles records and Bridge over Troubled Water, but that’s not so much a guitar album. The album that changed my life as a guitar player was Sounds Of Silence, and it sort of opened the door into folk and folk-rock and then Bob Dylan. “Anji, the Davy Graham cover, is one of the first tunes I learned to play on acoustic, and it’s an amazing tune. I challenged myself to learn it and got my head round it. That whole album is full of really, really cool guitar playing"