Cornelius Cardew's folk songs were very, very literal, and they were just about workers smashing their chains. It was like reading Das Kapital over a folk-song melody, and it's a spectacular failure, in my opinion.

John [Lennon] as a singer - the way he sings on Twist and Shout and the way he sings on Strawberry Fields Forever - is a very odd voice, in the sense that it seems to be celebrating but almost mourning at the same time. There's a quality of mourning to his voice, which is very enigmatic.

I remember the period in the 1980s where the Beatles were terminally uncool, and it seemed to me then like they were just my little secret, and the rest of the world didn't know anything about them.

One of the great things about being in a band is that you meet so many other musicians who will turn you on to stuff you would never have otherwise found out about.

I think the music that's part of your heritage is what you spend a lot of your early life rejecting. The very idea of folk music would break me out in hives until I was about 28. But I think it's nice when you eventually do come back to it. It's like coming home, and you realize it wasn't so bad after all.

I do like that idea that music can work on two levels, and you only pick up on the second one after a few listens.

I have the longing that all writers have for new ears to pour my words into.

I was very lucky, because when I was at school, I had a great music teacher who would just take out these free-jazz records and play them for me. So it was in my early teens that I started to listen to jazz.

I think that's one of the problems with downloading mps these days. You never really get a chance to attune to a different logic, a different musical logic. If you hear a song and don't like it, you'll just delete it off your hard drive.

I'm a huge Boards Of Canada fan. They're my favorite contemporary band. The interesting thing about Boards Of Canada is, they use analog and digital recording techniques, and nobody really knows how they get their sound. But I think that very warm, enveloping analog sound.

There's nobody on a normal income who can afford to live anywhere centrally, so everything becomes displaced and decentralized. The city [of London] becomes incongruent. It doesn't have any coherence anymore.

Folk songs in general, I like. The old spooky Scottish folk songs.