MELLOW HURDY GURDY SUNSHINE MAN

What music are you currently grooving to? Well, I’ve been working on an archive for some years now – 700 mastertapes arrived at my door! So I started listening to stuff I listened to when I was 16, as a young bohemian. Miles Davis’s Sketches Of Spain, that’s the cool one, it really is a mood. He was way out there on his own. That blue jazz mood entered a lot of my writing. And fado, Jake Bugg, early Leonard Cohen and Bert Jansch. I’ve been going back to the roots.

What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Gosh. I have favourites in many genres. But maybe the most influential one was the first Buddy Holly album. Amazing. Three minutes of altered states.

What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? I think it was Buddy Holly, Peggy Sue, something like that. I was living in Hatfield and I’d work on the market selling cakes, get a bit of money and run straight to the record stall.

Which musician, other than yourself, have you ever wanted to be? You can’t do that can you? To be in their shoes for a day… I like my own shoes! But I’d like to have seen Paganini, and to have been with Beethoven, and Robert Johnson. I’d like to have met him in one of those juke joints.

What do you sing in the shower? O Sole Mio. I like pretending opera sounds.

What is your favourite Saturday night record? Gosh. I’m thinking of cool drives in the evening in the Hertfordshire countryside, get in, light up a joint, listen to Green Onions. Classic pop records. Unchained Melody too, out of this world production.

And your Sunday morning record? Yeah. Something easy and cool – Pablo Casals’ The Swan. Hopeful, melancholy sounds, I like – one has a very introspective feeling in the morning.