I’ve got a curious relationship with ambient music these days. You know you get Spotify Wrapped? Well, my Spotify Wrapped age is 21! Because I tend to wake up at 3am and listen to ambient music to get back to sleep, it thinks that I’m Generation Z! 

But I find it kind of soothing, like Harold Budd’s stuff or Brian Eno’s Music For Airports, and I kind of stumbled across The Blue Notebooks on Radio 3. It’s so hypnotic and it’s so sad, yet it’s utterly compelling. I listen to it all of the time, especially ‘On The Nature Of Daylight’, and it just does something magical, and it’s lovely to think that you’re in the presence of a modern classic and you know it. Something’s happening there and it presses all of my buttons.

When I did Desert Island Discs a long time ago, and you boil down your choices, it was very hard, and I got down to about 30 and I noticed that they were all sad. I looked at them and I thought, this looks like I’m trying to make some kind of point. So I consciously changed a couple of them – I chose Su Pollard to lighten it up – but the truth is that the music that I respond to is sad. That’s what really moves me. And even some of my favourite bits, which are actually quite upbeat, have a strain of melancholy to them.