JUSTIN CURRIE SINGER & SONGWRITER

What are your strongest musical memories?

The first few listens of I am the Walrus when I was 12 were so insane that they are kind of buried in my memory. It’s very barbed and angry and I suppose it appealed to my latent rebellion or something because it sounds like quite a savage criticism of 1960s mores and cultural cons. And as a young, pre-punk it appealed to me, the anger and snidiness of it. It’s a very snide song.

Do you have any surprising favourites?

When I was really young

I got hooked on Gilbert O’Sullivan. There is a song called Nothing Rhymed which I know backwards. I used to sing it a lot in the living room of the wee cottage we used to have in Kibworth Harcourt in Leicestershire. My mum and dad had bought a stereo, which was quite posh in those days – a Crown stereo. My mum must have liked Gilbert O’Sullivan, or my sisters, and she bought his first two albums. I became obsessed with them and I used to sit at the coffee table pretending I was playing his piano parts and singing along. At the end of every song I would stand up and take a bow to the silent applause.

What does music mean to you?

We did a lot of tour buses in the ’90s and you’d find yourself stuck on the freeways of America for months at a time. I don’t know if you would get homesick but you could get quite emotional at times lying on your bunk. I remember listening to Curtis Mayfield’s second album, Curtis, which has a really incredibly saccharine, sweet, sentimental love song called The Makings of You. The first time I ever burst out crying to a piece of music was listening to that – too much beer, total exhaustion and a song that just bypasses all your conscious filters and goes straight for the heart. When I hear it now it still reminds me of that. I couldn’t say, ‘Oh, maybe that lyric’s a bit too cheesy’ or ‘That chord is a bit too sweet’. It’s just pure love and sentiment, in the right sense of the word, and it always makes me feel kind of wonderful.