"The Cure were my gateway drug – a year or two later I discovered the Legendary Pink Dots, because I had a boyfriend who was really into them. That blew my mind. It was an entirely new way of being into a band, because they weren't well known. And the music touched me in a place that the Cure couldn't ever dream of reaching. Part of that had to do with the intimacy and depth of Edward Ka-Spel's songwriting, but also the fact that this was a band that no one in my high school had heard of. They were really, really special – they were my band. I became a devotee. If I could wish anything on any teenager, it's that they could get to have a relationship with a band like that, because the Legendary Pink Dots made me so incredibly happy. I really considered them a holy band. Going to see them live was like going to church. They're highly underappreciated band, and I wander around proselytising them all the time. But it's difficult to know where to start, because they have like 900 records. It's overwhelming. I counted the amount of Pink Dots records I have, and it's well over 50, with all the side projects and all the Edward Ka-Spel solo stuff. They're music putter-outers. In one life-changing experience when I was 18 or 19, I not only got to meet them, but they were staying at the house of a friend of mine and I was able to go over to the house after the show and hang with the band. It was my fantasy come true. This really is biopic stuff. I couldn't have scripted my life any better. My friend knew I was a musician and that I had a demo tape, and he said to the Legendary Pink Dots, 'You should hear her stuff.' And they said, 'Sure, put it on.' I nearly shit myself. It was the moment of judgement. This had been my favourite band for years, I couldn't believe I was even in the room with them, and this guy told me to go grab my demo tape so they could listen to it. It was unbelievable. So we sat there, in what was the longest ten minutes of my life, and we popped the tape in and played two songs, and they were like 'Yeah, sounds really good.' And then about half an hour later, I was on the porch sharing a cigarette with Edward Ka-Spel and he looked and me and said 'You know, I think your songs are genuinely really good, and I don't say that to everybody.' In that moment I legitimately decided that I could do this, because I felt like I'd been given transmission from the master. That one little moment of encouragement took me so far, and I always remember that when I'm talking to my own fans."

"I could have chosen any of the first three releases by Pixies – the Come On Pilgrim EP, Surfer Rosa or Doolittle. We bumped into Pixies when 'Sit Down' was number two in the charts. We were staying in the same hotel as them. I had seen them on TV and thought they were okay. I didn't get them totally but I thought they were pretty interesting. I went up to Black Francis at breakfast and introduced myself. We got talking for about half an hour and hit it off instantly. He invited me to a gig they were playing that night in London. I dragged two members of James, who had never heard of Pixies, to the show. We were up in the balcony chatting and not totally paying attention. I remember after about four songs, Saul [Davies] turning and saying, ""Have you been listening to this?"" He pushed us to the front of the balcony and we watched genius in front of our eyes. It was incredible – the arrangements, the vocals – Black Francis screams like no other singer – and beautiful subtlety within their post-punk songs. Pixies should have been as big as Nirvana, but never had a cute Kurt Cobain frontman. They were always one of the most ungainly-looking bands on the planet, but they made the most heavenly music as far as I was concerned. I love the surreal nature of the lyrics, that didn't quite make sense. I was a singer and I was all about making sense and communicating, and here was a band that seemed to do the opposite and the results were fantastic. That was quite revolutionary to me. Later, when we worked with Brian Eno on five albums, he would say to me ""stop making sense"" and I would think of the Talking Heads album of the same name, but I would also think of Pixies. With Pixies, not a large amount of people got them back then, as they were too ahead of their time. When Kurt Cobain said that in his perfect life he would have been born as the lead singer of Pixies, many people began to discover them. It meant that when they returned from their hiatus, they were bigger than they were previously as everyone had caught up to realise that Pixies were one of the most influential and important bands of all time. I got to know them a bit more and once went to see them play a tiny warm-up gig in London. I went backstage and was talking to Black Francis about screaming. I was asking how he did it, because when I tried, it wrecked my voice and I couldn't sing. He told me that a Puerto Rican man, who was a chef in a crappy restaurant in California, taught him how to scream. He then tried to teach me. At the time, he failed. I can scream a bit more now, but I think I was born more of a crooner."