Andy Gill

"Sometimes I nose around on the internet, seeing what people are talking about. I'll download a track from iTunes just to check things out. 'Wanderlust' is one of the things I listened to. I think it's just fantastic. I love the way it's just got that one drumbeat, I think it's a drum machine, I'm not sure, and that's all it does. [Hayden Thorpe] has got a fantastic voice. It's got these sort of crappy-sounding keyboards, organs. Some of that album [Present Tense], I've been listening to it over the last few months, sometimes it's so overly pretty it puts you off a bit. They're obviously in love with 80s synth sounds, a lot of people are these days, and sometimes the arrangements on some of the songs just feel very 80s and slightly too ornate and slightly too pretty. But on 'Wanderlust' I think they completely nailed it and it's really just one part. It doesn't go through lots of different sections, the way the vocals and the music develop. It's a great song, very poppy, very pretty, driving and it makes its point."

"I was about 16. We had this great art room in school and an absolutely brilliant teacher, Bob White. This art room was really well equipped with dark rooms and screen printing and painting. Bob was quite happy for us to play records. If you were in there, you could hear what other people were putting on. Somebody older than me was hip and put on Velvet Underground & Nico. That was just so influential. I often think that the ones that have lasted really well for me are songs like 'Sunday Morning', some of the kind of quieter, more reflective ones."

"Erik Satie is something that, when I was at school, an English teacher who probably had a hangover, just said: "I'm gonna put on some music and you write something what comes into your mind." He put on the Erik Satie record - first time I heard it - and I thought, "Fuck, this is amazing." I really, clearly remember that day getting hold of some money and going to the record shop in town, and this is all they had, an interpretation of Satie involving Moog synthesisers. The synth sounds work so well with it. It gives a different angle, a different perspective. All the Satie records I've bought since are piano. All those amazing orchestrations by Debussy or Satie, orchestral interpretations. Satie is intrinsically very ascetic and plain. Really weird guy. I've lost the record now. I've got to find it! I think it's really, exceptionally brilliant."

"I guess I probably knew Dylan before I knew about The Band and kind of found The Band through Dylan. But I like the way that all of them sing. The three of them in particular, they've got really great, really characterful voices. And they do that thing of switching voices so you get the first verse with Rick Danko and then the bridge will be Robbie Robertson and that changes the perspective and stuff. And that's something that when Gang Of Four started, by the time we got to Entertainment!, one of the things we wanted was different characters. I kind of saw songs sometimes as being a little play, a little drama, so you have different characters. You have the main protagonist and maybe the other voice would be making comments about that character or somebody else would be a different character. To a certain extent, some of that came from The Band, I think. They're a weird bunch, they came from Canada, ended up in America and they kind of drew parallels between themselves and North American history and the way a lot of Canadians ended up in New Orleans and they called them Acadian driftwood. And they kind of sing about aspects of the Civil War and stuff like that. And also they've got a sense of history. It's very much not standard rock & roll subject matter, you know. It's not cars, girls, guitars, and I love that. And they're emotionally touching. They didn't have easy lives, things didn't pan out brilliantly. I'm touched by the way that you can hear their struggles through life in their music and what they're saying."

"Who was it who did it before Marvin Gaye? They did it slower and more piano-driven. But I knew this version first and you could see the difference, how this version took the earlier version and streamlined it, sped it up, made it groovier, those kinds of things. When I first heard it, I had not heard anything quite as funky. The groove is just incredible, which has a lot do with the bass line. It's fantastically cool and sexy. A friend of mine from years ago was a barrister. He was trying to tell me The Beatles were fantastic. And I was trying to tell him the trouble with The Beatles was they don't groove. And he said, ""What is groove?"", like a typical magistrate. I said, ""Listen to 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine. That's groove."" It's like trying to explain, without pointing, what the colour red is."

"Definitely my favourite song on that record [Yeezus]. I think it's a great record, if you can get past the ""bitches"" and what's that about Chinese pussy? Kanye, fucking grow up man, you're not 15. I was talking to Michael Azerrad, 'cause he's got me to do a couple of podcasts for him. And his clever little thing is to get musicians to review other albums. In conversation, I mentioned this track, and he said he got Lou Reed to write about the record. He said Lou Reed was in tears listening to this track. It's a very emotional track and it's very clever. He switches between making jokes and sounding very desperate indeed. One minute he's being very flippant, and I guess it's like being drunk and not drunk. The drink and the comedown, the hangover, whatever. Really beautiful, but also powerful, and quite punk in a way. And the arrangement is so clever and unexpected and unusual. He'll give you one thing and then give you something quite different, but it all works from section to section. I heard this while I was making What Happens Next and I was really impressed with the synth bass sounds, so I ended up having Thomas [McNeice] in, and we worked out where there would be a mixture of his bass playing and some electronic bass. You know, Lou Reed's point is that Kanye is demonstrating what he can get away with, which is good. I think there's quite a few ""I can do what I like moments"", including talking about ""sweet and sour pussy"" [sic]."

"You know, I loved the early records, Axis: Bold As Love, loved Electric Ladyland; it was fantastic. I loved his bravado and the feedback. All his guitar playing is amazing, but seeing him do 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at Woodstock, you know, that's pretty amazing. And also at Monterey Pop, when he sets fire to the guitar, for me, when I first saw that..."

"I first heard it when I was a little kid. I thought, ""What is this?"", trying to get my head around it. You've got to do a dance as a little kid to figure it out, and with all the most interesting stuff it takes you a while to get it. It's so fucking modern. You could pick a number of songs, but the architecture of those songs, it's like these super-tight rhythm sections and it doesn't really go anywhere. The groove is the thing. Sometimes he goes, ""Take it to the bridge!"" and they change it, but then they go back to the groove. It's not like a traditional song structure. The streamlined simplicity of it, and not being distracted by harmonic development, strikes me as being so revolutionary and modern. It makes me think of painting. Sometimes he's just groaning and yelping, and he's kind of like Jackson Pollock over this very tight structure, this kind of animalistic thing smeared across the song. You can see the connection to the blues, you can see the connection to early jazz, but he takes it somewhere else completely different."