"Now they had one very very particular effect on my life. It was a song they did, which I expect some of you here will know, called Grand Hotel. Whenever I'm writing I tend to have music on in the background, and on this particular occasion I had Grand Hotel on the record player. This song always used to interest me because while Keith Reid's lyrics were all about this sort of beautiful hotel - the silver, the chandeliers, all those kind of things, but then suddenly in the middle of the song there was this huge orchestral climax that came out of nowhere and didn't seem to be about anything. I kept wondering what was this huge thing happening in the background? And I eventually thought ... it sounds as if there ought to be some sort of floorshow going on. Something huge and extraordinary, like, well, like the end of the universe. And so that was where the idea for The Restaurant at the End of the Universe came from - from Grand Hotel."