"I had a group of friends who were all into rap, and we’d drive around and listen to jazzy, laid-back East Coast hip hop. If you didn’t go into New York it was boring, so we’d spend endless time driving in my friend’s car listening to Digable Planets, A Tribe Called Quest or De La Soul. I wrote an article for my high school newspaper about the hidden links between punk and rap."

"When I was a teenager, I was an avid Smash Hits reader - all through the 80s, that's what I read. So when the Beastie Boys and Run DMC came along, I was all over it. We were nicking VW signs from cars, skateboarding. That was a really big thing for ages. I was into that stuff for a while but the one hip hop album I listened to the most was this one. It's another one that doesn't ever fade. It's got this depth to it, and it's easy. But it's also serious and it's bumping. Obviously there are loads of other really important hip hop albums for me: Notorious B.I.G, Dr Dre, Jay-Z. I get a similar feeling from listening to really good hip hop that I get listening to Nubian music. The whole way of writing with loops really appeals to me. It was weird because I was listening to a lot of this kind of music, and playing and listening to a lot of jazz but they were two separate worlds. I was really into guitar music as well. When I was a kid I was really into Van Halen, heavy metal and all that stuff. Those two worlds never quite joined together. It wasn't until A Tribe Called Quest, and Galliano, Joyful Noise of the Creator. That Tribe Called Quest album, for me, joined those worlds. They mined a lot of old Lou Donaldson records, and other things, but it sounded really current as well. It pulled a lot of things together. And obviously, it branched out to lots of classic 90s hip hop: Guru, Jazzmatazz, Nas. It was a really amazing time."

"When I was growing up, hip-hop was pretty new. My oldest brother was really into it. Also, we had MTV from about 1990 onwards, so you'd see all these different people - A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy and Gang Starr - just became a soundtrack to whatever we were doing. I picked that one because I love DJ Premier's production, but also Guru's voice. I'm a big fan of the experimentation within hip-hop. Nowadays, people feel hip-hop has gone mainstream or whatever, but at that time, people were making records that were sampling very out there, experimental music, but combining them with parts from classical or jazz recordings, resulting in this very dense collage of sounds that is at times not even very melodic, but it's always got an amazing groove to it. It was those aspects in combination with Guru's voice, I just found it really inventive and exciting. Also, I would listen to it, and want to know where the samples had come from, and then I would go on missions to try and track things down. I think there was a Monk Higgins sample used on the track, 'Code Of The Streets', and that's just very alien-sounding. It's very basic, but it uses this beautiful violin part all the way through the track. They must have just been listening to such a wide variety of music, and what they've come out with is much more interesting that what came out post that era of hip-hop. You get some songs where there's a whole song taken, with just new lyrics added on. Back then though, there would have been as many as forty songs sampled in one song sometimes."