I love how Magritte's paintings initially look quite normal. He lures you in with the colours and compositions and shortly after the concept blows your mind. You think: "That's just a normal… aagh!"  They're like Tojan horses. The first painting that made me think, "Oh my god,that's something amazing" was Young Girl Eating a Bird. I liked how enigmatic Magritte's work was, how you didn't quite kow what was going on. Surrealism and absurdity, Monty Python and Vic Reeves, they were the first things that I really buzzed off and thought, "wow, that's what I want to do". The fact that there was a surrealist movement really appealed to me too, that they met up and drank crème de menthe in weird Parisian cafes. I loved that these grown men like Breton and Magritte would really seriously discuss poems, automatic writing and painting and then put things in their magazines like a man throwing a rock at a priest. I guess it was quite punk at the time. 

Magritte's paintings always make me laugh. I don't care if other people say they're not funny. I find it ridiculous when you walk around a gallery and people are just looking at something obviously funny and stroking their chins. A Magritte painting such as the reverse mermaid is like a stand-up joke. Comedians do those reverse jokes all the time. When I was quite young, I did 

a painting of a cat phoning the fire brigade and an old lady stuck up a tree.

- Noel on Magritte