"Previously known as the 21st Birthday Album, this is a gorgeous and goofy compilation of 45 fun and experimental electronic tone poems made for radio and TV from 1958 to 1979, some from the days when the music department only allowed the Workshop to exist by pretending electronic music wasn't music (just as Forbidden Planet was scored with "electronic tonalities"). So since no one was being taken seriously, the composers could even be women, of whom Delia Derbyshire has recently gained acclaim (in electronic-music geek circles; if you're not in one, it's not too late to join!). The longest track, 'A Whisper from Space', is 2:11; so if something doesn't grab you, wait a minute. If only all records could be this varied and entertaining. Derbyshire's immortal Dr. Who theme isn't even necessarily the best track. "

"I was reading about Ian Dury a few years ago. I'd heard his music before and I must confess, I wasn't that impressed. I found him to be a captivating figure, but the music was just too 1979 funky pub-rock. I didn't relate to it. But I wanted to read about him and then I discovered he had a son named Baxter who's a musician. Since then, I've probably listened to Happy Soup more than any record in the past few years – maybe a thousand times. I've had requests from my wife to please put on a different fucking record. All my five kids know the whole thing by heart because I got obsessed with it. It's starting to get a bit insanity-inducing. I still listen to music like a little kid: I discover something, I like it, and that's all I listen to for a while."

"I was not really listening to what was going on in 1979. A lot of popular music wasn’t very good. There was a lot of punk hangover and a lot of it was a bit… whatever. At that point, Wire were stratospheric; it wasn’t really important to listen to what other people were doing. We didn’t have anything to do with Gang of Four. They were coming from a very different place. We studiously ignored Joy Division because they seemed a little too derivative of us. Maybe that seems like arrogance in hindsight but that’s how it felt at the time. Bert Jansch’s Avocet was very off compared to what was going on in music in the late ’70s. I knew about him when I was in school because he was in Pentangle. The whole thing with music fans in the late ’60s was all about: “Are you Jimi or Eric?” Then there was a group of us who were a bit cooler who said: “Are you Bert or John?” Which meant John Renbourn, the other guitarist in Pentangle. The kind of people who liked Jimi Hendrix would sit in their room playing solos and making a guitar face."

"I heard Nick Drake quite early on, in 1981, when nobody of our generation really knew him. A friend of mine had a big brother who had given him the Fruit Tree box set [first released in 1979]. When I heard it I was all, 'What is this?' Listening to him, I felt like I was going into a world no-one else knew, especially when everyone else was into post-punk. I also found it very sad, as it was the last album he made a few years before he died.

I've got a funny story about it, too. I did one of my first sessions for Manchester Piccadilly Radio in 1981 or so, when Mark Radcliffe was working there. I came down on the bus all the way from Hull, and he was housesitting for someone in the music industry at the time – I can't remember who – but I had nowhere to stay, so I just slept on the floor there. I remember staying up late with Mark going through this music industry guy's record collection, then finding some Nick Drake records and getting really excited. Going, 'Oh, Mark, do you know him?', and Mark going, 'No, who's he? He's great!' He became a big fan."