"I think this is Steve's masterpiece. On my first day on foundation in Winchester, the tutor played everybody 'Piano Phase' and it was the first time I'd heard music like that. It completely blew my mind. The repetition; the shifting; the way those two pianos phased in and out with each other; it's an extraordinary piece of work. And he resolved that through a number of pieces and he came up with Music For 18 Musicians, which was the first large scored piece he'd done. I went to India in the early 80s and I had a very small number of cassettes with me that I could listen to, and that was one of them. I remember sitting on a roof somewhere listening to that and looking up at the sky. It is a kind of cosmic record in a way. I don't know if you have to like Steve Reich to know what that is, in a way. If someone was coming to it and they didn't know that music I don't know what they'd make of it. If you're used to listening to tunes would you just wonder where the tune is? It's all about harmony and rhythm, but it's intensely beautiful."

"Kristin Hersh is no ordinary musician, and her mind is unlike any other. In her memoir, Paradoxical Undressing, she captures what it’s like to be young and starting out, but this is a grazed reality, the top layer of skin stripped clean away. The book is based on a diary she kept when she was 18, which is, as she says, “the age when no one takes care of you”. It was a year when everything happened. She moved her band, Throwing Muses, from Providence, Rhode Island, to Boston. She was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, then bipolar. She was offered her first recording contract, with 4AD. She discovered she was pregnant. And she became unlikely friends with faded Hollywood movie star, Betty Hutton. “Betty sings about starlight and champagne,” Hersh writes. “I sing about dead rabbits and blow jobs.” Though Hutton was unpredictable and fragile (“Time is like a hurricane to her – a big, fast mess, sweeping her away”) she was also full of generosity, compassion and advice. “You have to leave things out to tell a story,” she once told Hersh. And Hersh listened. This female Kurt Cobain – he was a fan of her work – has forged her own brave path, often against enormous odds. And she writes better sentences than most writers do."

"This is a bit of a sidestep, but in 1987 I went to the States on a Camp America. Me and my mate applied and we got in and he went to work in this really posh Jewish camp in Massachusetts somewhere, with all these lovely kids. I was working with these underprivileged kids from The Bronx, in Carmel in upstate New York. These kids were rough. I was 18 and they were like 12 and some of them were bigger than me. I shared a cabin with a guy called Daryl who was from New York. He just played the Run–D.M.C. album all day. Bigger And Deffer was out then too, the LL Cool J album. I just loved it. That was when I got into hip-hop. I wasn't sold on the music. I always thought it was a bit lumpy, before Public Enemy came out. It was missing a groove really. But 'It's Tricky' is really uptempo. It's really aggressive, which I liked. It's got that 'My Sharona' riff and that's not going to send you wrong is it? It sounded great in the house. It sounded so alien. My mum and dad didn't want to know and when you're that age you want to be freaking out the straights."

"""It’s a cliché, perhaps, but I can’t say this about any other song: I can literally remember the first time I heard ‘Lithium’. I remember being in the room when my sister put it on, almost in the dark and I remember thinking ‘What the hell is this?’ Much like any other kid really. But it properly blew me away in one sitting and that’s never happened since. And with the people in that room, I started a band within a few months. We played together till I was about 17 or 18. “How do you even talk about Nirvana? Everything about them is so perfectly packaged, but in an accidental way - the way they look, the way Kurt sings, the way Dave plays. It’s a ‘lightning strike’ sort of band, and you can’t really copy it, you can’t really take anything from it except attitude. “The lyrics are kind of awful if you actually sit down and go through them, but when you’re 14 they’re absolutely amazing. All of it works really well for a really specific time in your life. It’s absolute dynamite, and still is, I see more Nirvana t-shirts now than I did when I was a kid."""

"My mum was into Björk, and at the time I was just like, ahh it’s just my mum’s music, so I was listening at maybe teenage years, 13 or 14 but then really got into it at 18. Like, ‘Oh I get this, this is actually more me than I thought it was’. That whole album of Debut, ‘Human Behaviour-, production wise, content, just sound - when you hear them drums, they’re so gritty and cyclical. I think that was the main thing I was trying to get across with my album, that sound. Björk, I think is the master of that, whatever she does she creates a world in her own albums. So whether you listen to Debut, Vespertine, Vulnicura, Post - all of her records have an identical feeling when you listen to them and I'm like, ‘okay, I've stepped into Björk’s domain’. I don't know how she does it, but I was trying to do something like that with Dark Matter, like this is the sound. This record is very different to everything else and it’s got a sound that can make you feel something - feeling and emotion and response to sound and vibrations was something I was kind of going for with my record."