4. Simon & GarfunkelBookends

I saw the film The Graduate when I was 15 and heard the track ‘The Sound Of Silence’ and I immediately went out and bought the songbook and learned every song. Hearing Simon & Garfunkel was the thing that made me decide I would really like to make music for a living. I could play the songs, and suddenly music seemed much less foreign to me. Before that it was watching people on Top Of The Pops doing their thing, and it was just another world to me, it didn’t seem like something that could be homegrown or that I could possibly achieve. At the time I’d just started going to the school guitar club and learning basic chords, and this music came along and I thought, "Ah, I can learn that".

I like the simplicity of the lyrics, and there’s a naivety to the songwriting, and when they write about New York and that, now I live here and have been visiting for years, I can see where their inspirations came from. You can’t deliberately be naive, you write simple songs I guess, and hopefully something that you do happens in the writing process. I’m really into melody, I couldn’t listen to a jazz fusion record for instance, I’m the opposite end of the scale, that’s all.