I've listened to music all my life. I've always felt that music tells more stories sometimes than films, with more possibilities. Every time you listen to them, songs bring different images and moods - depending on where you are in your life, you can listen to a song, and it means something different.
When I write, I like squeezing as many words as possible into each bar - I've listened to the Fugees and Lauryn Hill for as long as I can remember, so probably a big chunk of it subconsciously comes from that.
Growing up, I listened to a lot of jazz and blues records - John Coltrane and Etta James. I was also really into Radiohead and the BeeGees.
I took a lot of long summer road trips with my dad, and the mix of music we listened to on the road skipped around from classical to Western to new age to hyper-cinematic.
Hip hop was definitely, far and away, the primary influence for at least 10 years of my life. From about 7 or 8 on till about 15 or 16, that's all I listened to.
I really want it to have an impact on the world. I want to be in a town on the other side of the world, and somebody walks up and says, 'That music you made in Glasgow, I listened to it every day, and it moved me.'
Sometimes I've made mistakes and not really listened to my instincts, and I've done a project, and I've been disappointed with the consequence, I think, as a consequence of not listening to whatever part of me it is that, at its base, is interested in telling interesting stories.
Growing up, I never listened to English music. I was more into Motown, as well as early rock n' roll like Chuck Berry and Little Richard.
I have a very long and beautiful love affair with Elvis Presley. I own every record he ever made, so I have about 150, almost 200 records of his. So much that I haven't even listened to all of them. I see an Elvis record that I don't have, and I'll buy it and put it in my collection.
In the '90s, you couldn't say the word 'nerd' to someone when pitching a show. They would have considered that too niche and wouldn't have listened.
