John Rutter, the London Sinfonia and the Cambridge Singers - Faure’s Requiem
This is an album that [producer] Tim Palmer introduced me to when we were making Carved In Sand. It’s just a perfect Sunday morning record really, it’s just one of those that you put on and it’s just so beautiful and mellow. I don’t know what else to say about it, really. I’ve bought several versions of this particular piece of music over the years, performed by different orchestras, but this is my favourite. It’s the first one I heard, which is by the Cambridge Singers and John Rutter. And I was reading about this actually just the other day - I thought I’d better do a bit of research for this interview - and apparently this was the first time that Faure’s Requiem was performed from the original score, and as close to what Faure intended as possible. Because what happened when he wrote it the sheet music got updated and updated and things got added over the years, but they found the original manuscript, and this was the first time that it was performed that way. It’s a beautiful piece of music, simple as that, really. And I’ve been listening to this for twenty-odd years now.

I do have a lot of classical music. I don’t listen to it as much as I once did; maybe ten years ago I was listening a lot to it. And the thing about classical music, and even with Faure’s Requiem where there are voices, I can’t understand what they’re saying because it’s in Latin; it’s more about the music. And the best classical music touches my soul in a way that lyrical music doesn’t, if that makes sense. It’s all about melody, and that really becomes more primal to me than melody with words.

There’s a lot of other albums I could’ve talked about; there’s Berlin by Lou Reed, I was thinking about Closer by Joy Division, Pet Sounds of course, Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd - but there you are; you caught me on a day when I chose these thirteen.