It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me.

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I'm doin' now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

My whole thing is to inspire, to better people, to better myself forever in this thing that we call rap, this thing that we call hip hop.

I heard Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and that was it. I didn't ever want to be anything else. I just started banging away and semi-studied classical music at the Royal Academy of Music but sort of half-heartedly.

I started to write the song. And I was in Gladewater, Texas, one night with Carl Perkins and I said, I've got a good idea for a song. And I sang him the first verse that I had written, and I said it's called "Because You're Mine." And he said, "I Walk The Line" is a better title, so I changed it to "I Walk The Line."

I first heard Miles Davis as a student, when I was struck by his extraordinary musicianship, and his work did affect some of the sounds of Simply Red. He was one of the reasons I chose to have a muted trumpet on 'Holding Back the Years.'