"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."

"They're a psychedelic rock band from the early '70s. I didn't know about psychedelic rock when we began, but we were often compared to psych music. To be honest, I was completely ignorant of it. People would use quotes like: ""Mercury Rev is the new Hawkwind."" I had no idea who Hawkwind were! But now, many years later, my girlfriend is introducing me to psych rock from the mid-'60s. Not just stuff like 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' by Iron Butterfly, but also from the esoteric, better defined albums that are wholly obscure. Not only that, but it also has the idea of a concept record and melodrama, flutes and guitars going on. It was strange when I heard Lemmings when we were recording The Light In You and I thought, wow, nothing new under the sun! The moment you think you're onto something original, all you have to do is listen to something from thirty years ago to see someone was onto this all the while back! So it was really stunning to hear this Bachdenkel record from 40 years prior that was attempting or aspiring to something we were in the midst of."