inspirations

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Architecture

Barajas AirportAntonio Lamela and Richard Rogers (Barajas Airport, Madrid, right)... Charles Rennie Macintosh (Glasgow School of Art)... Frank O. Gehry (Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao)... Philip Webb (The Red House, Upton)... Joseph Maria Olbrich (Secession exhibition building, Vienna)... Zaha Hadid (Phaeno Science Center, Wolfsburg)... Edwin Lutyens (Deanery Garden House, Berkshire)... Frank Lloyd Wright (Robie House, Chicago)... Rem Koolhaas (Casa da Música, Porto)... Otto Wagner (Post Office Savings Bank, Vienna)... Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott (Red House, Isle of Man)... Charles Voysey (Broad Leys, Windermere)... Antoni Gaudí (The Casa Batlló, Barcelona)... Adolf Loos (Looshaus, Vienna)... Enric Miralles (Scottish Parliament Building, Edinburgh)...

Art & Sculpture

SylvetteJohannes Vermeer; Pablo Picasso (right); Alphonse Mucha; Marc Chagall; Gustav Klimt; Archibald Knox; Caravaggio; Salvador Dali; Henri Rousseau; Henry Moore; Egon Schiele; Henri Matisse; Peter Blake; Edvard Munch; Jean-François Millet; Inge Morath; Auguste Rodin; Claude Monet; William Morris; Edgar Degas; Marie Laurencin; Gwen John; Amedeo Modigliani; M.C. Escher; Camille Pissarro; Edouard Vuillard; Pierre Bonnard; Vincent Van Gogh; Alfred Sisley; Hokusai; Ralph Steadman; René Lalique; J.M.W. Turner; Joan Miró; Édouard Manet; Francisco de Goya; Andy Warhol; Antony Gormley; David Hockney; Paul Gauguin; René Magritte; Pierre-Auguste Renoir; Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret MacDonald; Paul Cézanne; Georges-Pierre Seurat; Jackson Pollock; Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; Louise Bourgeois; Francesca Jackson; Oskar Kokoschka; Ying Zheng's Terracotta Army...

Cinema

CasablancaIt's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra); The Third Man (Carol Reed); A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger); Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick); North By Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock); The Sting (George Roy Hill); Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, right); Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder); Finding Neverland (Marc Forster); Monty Python's Life of Brian (Terry Jones); The Piano (Jane Campion); Annie Hall (Woody Allen); The Apartment (Billy Wilder); Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti); Withnail And I (Bruce Robinson); Don't Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker); Duck Soup (Leo McCarey); Blow Up (Michelangelo Antonioni); The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola); La Belle noiseuse (Jacques Rivette); Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean); Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee); Meet Joe Black (Martin Brest); The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke); Carmen (Carlos Saura); JFK (Oliver Stone); Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola); Chinatown (Roman Polanski); Un Coeur en hiver (Claude Sautet); This is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner); Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg); Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg); Chocolat (Lasse Hallström); Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah); Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders); All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula)...

Literature

Alice in WonderlandThomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles; Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea; A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad; Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol; Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant; Herman Melville's Moby Dick; Jack Kerouac's On the Road; Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenin; Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson; Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's Kiss; The War Poems of Wilfred Owen; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes; Antoine de Saint Exupéry's Night Flight; George Orwell's Animal Farm; The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon; Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights; Bram Stoker's Dracula; Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (above); J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings; Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island; William Rosetti's Poems of Christina Rosetti; William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet; Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows; Bob Dylan's 11 Outlined Epitaphs; Leonard Cohen's God is Alive, Magic is Afoot; T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land; The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel; Prosper Mérimée's Carmen; Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books; Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney; Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems: And a Song of Despair...

Music...

KT TunstallLudwig van Beethoven; Robert Johnson; John Coltrane; Frédéric Chopin; KT Tunstall (right); Jaco Pastorius; Bill Evans; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; Miles Davis; Toru Takemitsu; Muddy Waters; Paco de Lucía; B.B. King; Arcade Fire; Gram Parsons; Alban Berg; Jimi Hendrix; Kronos Quartet; Keith Richards; Bob Dylan; John Lee Hooker; Claude Debussy; Richard Sinclair; Gustav Mahler; Pat Metheny; Joe Zawinul; Peter Green; Keith Jarrett; Charlie Parker; Carlos Santana; Jean Sibelius; Ali Farka Touré; Howlin' Wolf; Damien Rice; Thelonious Monk; Bonnie Raitt; Ian Dury; J.S. Bach; Jeff Buckley; Camarón de la Isla; Eric Clapton; Sevara Nazarkhan; Igor Stravinsky; Joni Mitchell; John Lennon; Kate Rusby; Benjamin Britten; David Gilmour; Isaac Albéniz; Chick Corea; Youssou N'Dour; Marvin Gaye; Sergei Prokofiev; Eva Cassidy; Valery Gergiev; Brian Wilson; Otis Redding; Béla Bartók; Scott Walker; Tan Dun; Duane Allman; Maurice Ravel; Beth Orton; Sergei Rachmaninoff'; Karen Matheson; Karol Szymanowski; Robert Wyatt; Björk; Steve Cropper; Dmitri Shostakovich; Gil Evans; Buffy Sainte-Marie; John Martyn; Ralph Vaughan Williams; Paco Peña; Django Reinhardt; Sandy Denny; Nick Drake; Ojos de Brujo; Bob Marley...

....I couldn't live without...

Sevara NazarkhanVaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis; Robert Johnson's King of the Delta Blues Singers; Allegri's Miserere; Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone; Ireland's Sarnia; Damien Rice's O; Walton's Viola Concerto; Youssou N'Dour's Set; Neil Young's After the Goldrush; Weather Report's Heavy Weather; Mozart's 'Jupiter' Symphony; Sevara Nazarkhan's Yol Bolsin (right); Bill Evans' Paris Concert; Jeff Buckley's Lilac Wine; Björk's Vespertine; Kevin Volans' White Man Sleeps; Albéniz's Iberia; Ojos de Brujo's Barí; Marvin Gaye's I Heard It Through the Grapevine; Beethoven's Late String Quartets; Fairport Convention's Unhalfbricking; Paco de Lucía's Almoraima; John Coltrane's Live Trane: The European Tours; Bax's Tintagel; Min Xiao-Fen's Spring, River, Flower, Moon, Night; Prokofiev's 1st Violin Concerto; Gram Parsons' Grievous Angel; Bartók's Hungarian Folk Songs from Csik; Rodrigo y Gabriela's Live Manchester & Dublin; Strauss' Vier letzte Lieder; The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night; Joni Mitchell's concert film Shadows and Light; Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No.2; Ali Farka Touré & Ry Cooder's Talking Timbuktu; Rachmaninoff''s 2nd Symphony; Hossam Ramzy & Rafa El Tachuela's Flamenco Arabe; Dwight Yoakam's This Time; Bruckner's 8th Symphony; The Kinks' Waterloo Sunset; Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier; John Mayall & Eric Clapton's 'Beano' album; Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad; Salif Keita's Moffou; Soft Machine's Moon In June; The Intrada from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker; Camarón de la Isla's Potro de rabia y miel; Johnny Cash's American Recordings; Sibelius' 5th Symphony; Rokia Traoré's Bowmboï; Jacqueline du Pré's Elgar Cello Concerto; Issa Bagayogo's Tassoumakan; Mahler's 3rd Symphony; Bob Dylan's The Freewheelin'...; Capercaillie's Delirium; John Tavener's The Protecting Veil; Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell's Ain't No Mountain High Enough; Miles Davis' Kind of Blue; Arcade Fire's Funeral; Beethoven's 9th Symphony...

(See 'Musical notes' below)

People

Dian FosseyGroucho Marx; David Attenborough; John Lennon; Bob Dylan; Stephen Fry; Buster Keaton; Pablo Picasso; Sylvie Guillem; John Peel; William Wallace; Gavin Maxwell; George Harrison; Dian Fossey (right); James Dean; Rudolf Nureyev; Misia Sert; Al Gore; Shami Chakrabarti; Martha Graham; Johnny Cash; Steve Jobs; Marilyn Monroe; Deep Throat (W. Mark Felt); Julie Christie; Jools Holland; Martin Luther King Jr; W.C. Fields; Joan Baez; William Morris; Dilbert; Stephen Hawking; Sean Connery; Rick Stein; Humphrey Bogart; The Unknown Rebel (Tank Man); Keith Richards; Woody Guthrie; Stan Laurel; Verity Sharp; Che Guevara; Lisa Simpson; Eric Morecambe; Ivor Cutler; Patrick Moore; Sherlock Holmes...

Photography

Pergamena by Anna ArcaAnsel Adams; Henri Cartier-Bresson; Dennis Stock; David Bailey; Andrei Tarkovsky; Martine Franck; Eve Arnold; Robert Doisneau; Gisele Freund; Annie Leibovitz; Andy Rouse; Diane Arbus; Terence Donovan; Anna Arca (right); André Villers; Sally Gall; Bill Brandt; Jean Dieuzaide; Alberto Korda; Angus McBean; Edward Weston; Wolfgang Tillmans; John Sexton; Catherine McIntyre; Michael Freeman; Loretta Lux; Herbert Bayer; Ralph Gibson; Peter Defty; Louisa Thomas; Eliot Porter; László Moholy-Nagy; Curtis Moffat; Touhami Ennadre; Helmut Newton; Liberto Macarro; Nick Ut; Richard Avedon...

Places & Things

The MezquitaThe Alcázar, Seville... iPods... Edinburgh... Scrambled eggs with mango chutney... Dartmoor... Rioja wine... Open G tuning (thanks Keef!)... Madinat al-Zhara, Córdoba... Dublin... Fender Strats... The Mezquita, Córdoba (right)... Virginia Water... Apple computers... My Martin 00028... Tintagel... The koto... Cherry blossom... Grantchester... Museo de Bellas Artes, Seville... Vienna... The Alhambra, Granada... Late Junction (hello Verity)... Grez-sur-Loing... Museo del Arte Flamenco, Jerez... Snow and ice... Parque de María Luisa, Seville... Hyde Park... Bicycles... The Sound, Isle of Man... Dragonfly Tiffany lamps... Parliament Hill, London... Cramond... La Hougue Bie, Jersey... Penny Lane... My 1962 Gibson SG Les Paul... Cheese and apple... St Ives... Candlelight...

Breathtaking moments...

Tim and DawnThe finale of Blackadder Goes Forth... Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart's reunion kiss in Casablanca... KT Tunstall's debut on Later With Jools Holland... Lisa Hannigan's Silent Night on Damien Rice's O... Tim and Dawn's kiss at the end of The Office (right)... The first movement of Beethoven's Op.131 String Quartet... Bob Dylan's electrifying Like a Rolling Stone in Manchester, 1966... Arcade Fire performing Rebellion (Lies) on Later With Jools Holland, 2005... Mahler's Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (Rückert-Lieder)... Eric Clapton's guitar in The Beatles' While My Guitar Gently Weeps... Fleetwood Mac and John Mayall every month at Wood Green Jazz Club, 1967-1968... June Tabor's And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda... Hearing James MacMillan's The Confession of Isobel Gowdie for the first time in a virtually empty Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 1993... Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at the Toby Jug, Tolworth, 1968... David Gilmour's guitar solo at the end of Comfortably Numb in Pink Floyd's Pulse... Rambert's Ghost Dances... Bob Dylan singing an acoustic Mr. Tambourine Man in Edinburgh, 1995... Eva Cassidy's Fields of Gold... John Coltrane's Impressions... Captain Beefheart at Kingston Polytechnic, 1968 - only three people in the audience, including my girlfriend and me!... Anna Netrebko at the Last Night of the Proms, 2007... Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl's Fairytale of New York video... Robert Wyatt's Shipbuilding... Nunc dimitis from Rachmaninoff's Vespers... Capercaillie at Peel Castle, 1998... Jimi Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower... Summer of '69 (three months busking in Paris, the first Moon landing, Blind Faith and the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park, Bob Dylan at the Isle of Wight)... Weather Report's A Remark You Made... Pavarotti's Nessun Dorma... Howlin' Wolf's Smokestack Lightnin'... The love duet in Puccini's Madama Butterfly... The Byrds with Gram Parsons and The Dillards at Middle Earth, 1968... Blind Willie Johnson's Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground... The Beach Boys' God Only Knows... Seeing Francesca Jackson's paintings for the first time, late 2005... Bob Marley's No Woman, No Cry... Jiminy Cricket's When You Wish Upon a Star... Falling in love with a girl who played part of Walton's Viola Concerto for me on her viola on Port Erin beach, 1979. I never saw her again... The first time I heard a Mahler symphony in the concert hall (the 6th with Claudio Abbado and the LSO, Royal Festival Hall, 1978)...

Musical notes...

Sometimes I go through phases of listening to mostly one genre of music - maybe jazz, maybe classical, maybe world... but most of the time I'll happily mix and match all styles. It's all music. If you know BBC Radio 3's Late Junction, you'll know what I mean. I love to be surprised! The music "I couldn't live without" isn't 'favourites' as such - with a roomful of music to choose from and a wandering mind, I have 1000s of favourites! But some music has such an effect on me that whenever I hear it I have to stop what I'm doing to listen. That's what this (abridged) list is. As music is playing the whole time I'm working in my studio, this sometimes causes lapses in concentration and missed deadlines, especially if it's an hour-long Bruckner symphony! Which can be embarrassing! C'est la vie. Some things are more important, and I have understanding clients!

thoughts...

"Life is not measured by how many breaths you take, but by how many moments that take your breath away"
Hilary Cooper