"I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day," which I actually recorded on "Quality Street" because I don't think anyone has ever covered it before. You hear it every single Christmas, and it is a great record. That's by Wizzard. It is a really great record, but I don't think anyone's ever covered it before, so I had to go it doing it differently. It's quite different from how the original goes.

I'm an extremely slow worker, very unprolific. It can take me weeks to do a three-minute song, or at least to make it sound, in my mind, like I haven't written it. That's when I'm satisfied.

When I find a cover song that I like, I'll work away at it until I kind of believe that I wrote it.

I work very hard on getting the songs as direct and examined as I can before I go in the studio.

Elvis Costello had a brand new bag. He was a musician, but he knew all about the attitude part of it.

I'm still kind of a hapless character in my everyday life. But when it comes to the writing, my influences are very old influences. I love American music of absolutely all stripes, including show tunes, advertising jingles, theme tunes from quiz shows, all kinds of American music.

I've always felt quite like an outsider. I don't really belong in the mainstream, and I quite like that.