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.

When you're in a daze - whether it's from running or a hangover or whatever else - I think that ideas from your subconscious can slip through more easily. The way that I write songs, for what its worth, when I'm playing music, if it's good music it will bring images forward into my mind and then I'll write down what the images are and that becomes the lyrics. I think that process is just easier if the superego has just gone away in disgust for the day.

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.

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.

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

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.