Q

"One of my favourite places to be is the ancient world and judging from the number of books published about it, I’m not the only one. The Cleopatras by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones is about all the queens called Cleopatra: the one most of us know about being, in fact, Cleopatra VII. “The final century and a half of three millennia of male rulership in Egypt was a golden age for royal women, a period when queens finally came into their own,” he argues. You learn a lot about Ptolemaic Egypt as well as what was happening further East (the first Cleopatra was from Syria). Very striking is the marriage of brothers to their sisters within the royal family, and why that was seen as a good thing."

"It’s about Quincy Jones’s journey. He started out poor, born on the South Side of Chicago to a mentally ill mother. He went on to become one of the most influential producers in the industry. Music sort of saved him. He started to tour as a back-up musician in his teens with these amazing jazz bands. He ended up scoring all these movies, and then he got into producing. Quincy Jones produced the main Michael Jackson records. He started so young and he accomplished so much. Aside from the fact that his life is so interesting, I read this book as I was steering the ship on my own album. It showed me the skill of a great producer. It’s not necessarily that you’re playing things yourself – it’s the ability to bring together the best people and direct them to create your vision. That information was invaluable to me, as I’ve been developing my skills as a producer. I don’t consider myself a player of any instruments either. I can write on many instruments but don’t excel at any instrument and yet I’m very involved in every step of the creation of my music and I’m so particular about every sound. For me reading Q validated that skill set. It’s like a long lesson on how to make great records. Nowadays everyone uses the same crew that churned out the last pop hit rather than bringing the best of different genres together and creating something amazing and new, which was what Quincy Jones did. One of the reasons my music sounds different is I bring together people who do different things to create something new. Being an artist is such a rollercoaster – hearing about other people’s hardships and triumphs helps me keep going. I love doing collaborations because it’s an opportunity for me to step out of the restriction of whatever it is that I do with my music and just try something completely different. It’s fun and I’ve forged fantastic relationships through working on other people’s songs. So I really enjoy it."