“I thought I’d start from my first musical memory, which is this song. I’m one of seven kids; my family were breeders! My Dad and I would be in the car on our own sometimes and he would play music for me. It was our common interest and that’s how we bonded.

“I struggled to find my place growing up as a young queer boy. I was quite shy - although no-one ever believes that when they meet me now - and I remember I felt a lot of melancholy. I always felt like ‘No-one understands me!’ and I think all kids feel that, but as a young queer child I just knew from a very early age that I wanted something more. Music became an escape for me, and later it became a huge part of my life and career.

“This song is one that I go back to all the time. Even if I don’t listen to it, I hear it when I think about my Dad or my family. It’s dramatic and big and I love Scott Walker’s voice, it’s depressing yet cinematic. The Walker Brothers were very cheesy, but "Montague Terrace (In Blue)" feels a bit edgier. It got my interest spiked into digging deeper into music and looking for more than what’s initially put in front of you.”

“I always had a thing growing up with music, which is why I don’t really like music streaming culture, because I like the process of buying music. I liked the waiting for it to be released, the fact you saw posters in shops and magazines, and I liked going out and buying it - being able to touch it and then reading every bit of info in the sleeve. I wanted to know who produced it, who was the sound engineer, who did the artwork and who they thanked. I used to really be into that, and I’ve got a weird knowledge about producers in the ‘90s because I used to read the sleeves all the time.

“Anyway, I have a big sister called Paula and when we were growing up she was the only sibling I had who was massively into music. She was also massively into Boy George. I remember she used to dress up as him and get Smash Hits magazine delivered from our local newsagents. I remember when they had Culture Club on the cover, and it came through our letterbox.

“I saw this person on the front of the magazine, and I kid you not, I felt the deepest connection to this man. It was like an out of body experience. I was like ‘Is it a man? Is it a woman? Is it an alien? That’s me! That’s who I want to be! But I’m so scared. Can I touch him? What’s he doing?!’ I just stared at the magazine for ages. In my teens I used to treat Boy George like the way I would treat porn. I would sneak into my sister’s room and flick through her magazines, manically trying to find a picture of him.

“My sister and her friend, ‘Cool Sharon’, invited me into their gang and we listened to “Time” on my Dad’s record player when he was out. It was the first time I’d ever heard it and I remember my mind was completely blown. I kept asking her to put it back on, and by the end of the fourth play I’d directed the video in my head, except I was Boy George in the music video. In the end, my sister wrote a message on the record sleeve and gave the vinyl to me as a gift.

“Sometimes I feel that when you’re a showman or a larger than life character it’s the best thing - I mean, I’ve made a career out of it - but it can overshadow your actual talent. Boy George is an amazing songwriter and half of Culture Club’s hits are unrequited love letters to Jon Moss, who was the drummer in the band. The story of Culture Club is so fucking fascinating and his autobiographies are unbelievable, he doesn’t leave anything out. Boy George’s voice is amazing, he’s got the best tone and I really appreciate a good tone on a singer. I just love him.”

“Two words: Sexual. Awakening. I feel like music is super sexual now, people like music because of who they fancy, and the music videos are all about sex and attraction. That just wasn’t a thing for me, until I discovered Maxwell. I was about sixteen and it was the boom of MTV, ’95-’96. When I heard Maxwell, I fell in love.

“It’s weird to be a young gay man, but to not know what gay looks like and also to not fancy anyone. I remember thinking ‘I think I’m gay, but what is “gay”? I think I fancy men, but I don’t actually fancy anyone.’ Then Maxwell came along and that happened.

“His songs are like silk, velvet. I saw him as my dream man, because he looked like no-one I’d ever seen. He was seductive and my God... he just looks like a God. The video for “Luxury: Cococure” is really stripped back, it’s just him in a bath singing to the camera. I really did believe that I was going to go out with him and that I was going to marry him. Three of my boyfriends were actually like cut, copy, paste versions of Maxwell actually.

“On a deeper level, once I got past all of that, as I got older I realised that the genre of soul music, especially in the male world, can be very macho and can be all about gender norms. It’s very ‘Suck my dick’ kind of vibes, but Maxwell’s music is very sensitive - it’s from the heart and it’s beautiful. His influences are people like Kate Bush, he’s fascinating. He does the classic funk thing, but he’s got so many layers. He did a beautiful MTV Unplugged session too, the purity of his voice and his falsetto is second to none.

“This song is how, as someone who was a virgin at the time, I imagined that sex would feel. It sounds weird, but you know when there’s a cross of senses? When you’re not having sex and you don’t actually know how it feels, your other senses become more heightened. This song is how I imagined sex would feel. Turns out, it wasn’t like that at all!” (*sighs*)

“I spent many years feeling a bit lost after I came back from Australia. Jeremy and I split up - woe is me! - it’s OK, we’re still friends. I moved to London, where I wanted to become a star and a singer and all of that shit. I ended up working in retail for about eight years and then I met a woman who would change my life. My best friend, Amy, who I consider to be my wife for life.

“London is a hard city. Its mean, and I had no one to back me up for a long time. It beat me down, it took away all my determination and the lack of fear that originally made me move there. I stopped going to auditions, and I kind of gave into life. I started working in a shop, I got promoted to manager and I got myself to a really bad place, where I felt like I was living somebody else’s life. I ended up getting really bad panic attacks and felt really depressed.

“I met Amy just before that, and she was going through a similar thing in her life. We decided - ‘Fuck it!’ We gave each other the courage to start an event and to have fun. People always ask me ‘How did you start Sink the Pink?’ and whilst the details are a little cloudy, we started it because we fucking needed it. We would spend hours together in Amy’s flat for the first three years of Sink The Pink and it was like a dream factory. We became each other’s cheerleader, and we kept lifting each other up.

“Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” came out not long after this. If we were having a bad day, we would take all of our clothes off in front of each other, grab a hairbrush, put “Unwritten” on and blare it out. The lyrics were becoming the blueprint of what we wanted to do - “The rest is still unwritten” - we could do whatever we wanted! Who knew that we would become such loyal followers to the church of Natasha Bedingfield? We’ve booked her for this year’s Mighty Hoopla and we will lose our shit when she plays this.

“Good pop music is the hardest music to write. A good pop hit has to last the test of time, it can’t just be about production; it has to be really well written. And this is a really well written song. It’s the underdog song. We’ve been living by Bedingfield ever since.”

“I’ve always hated it when people ask me ‘What kind of music do you like?’ It’s ridiculous, it’s like asking people what their favourite colour is. Music is a spectrum, it’s an extension of the way you feel, your surroundings and specific moments in time.

“Dreams” is my favourite song of all time. This song never dies for me and yet it’s an album track, it was never released as a single. This album was when she stopped being with a major label, she went to a dance label and worked with people like Nick Cave.

“I love Kylie. She is the Queen of us all - and by “all”, I mean all queer people - but for me, a kid in the ‘80s who moved to Australia in the ’90s, she was huge. She’s continued to play a pivotal role in my life and she’s always there. This song is just gold. It’s cinematic, whimsical… and Kylie.”

Sink The Pink's 'Let's Get Physical' is on 21 March at The Troxy. Mighty Hoopla comes to London's Brockwell Park on 6 June