"These guys are a Brazilian 60s band, who people in their home country think of as their Beatles, but they're actually their own, weird, indescribable entity. The band is two brothers and a lady named Rita Lee. More than anything with this record, if you listen to it, you instantly want to live in Brazil – and you know a record is good if it makes you want to emigrate. It really conjures up a world. It's so imaginative and fun, it's part of that group of 60s records like Sgt Pepper's. They were 17 when they were making this record but they were already master songwriters with a massive skill and technique beyond almost everyone who is around right now. Just like The Beatles, they are able to be haphazard with it – they are so good they can have comedy skits in the middle of their songs: the coolest chorus with sound of breaking plates at the end of it. Apparently they were inventing machines while they were making it. They were putting their guitars through sewing machines. So the pulsing tremolo tone through one of the songs is the contact of the needle with the machine. Effectively they made a guitar pedal out of a sewing machine! It's super playful and Brazilian in character, but also perfectly fused with the international psychedelic revolution but it comes off as this other animal. It's the coolest thing when cultures get mixed together, it's so great to see that hybrid to happen. This band was important for me because when I was doing The Moldy Peaches because I was so inspired by how fun they were. My fantasy of what a show could be was them!"

"It's an album that had a massive effect on me when I was young. I remember on Steve Lamacq's Roundtable, there was a track from Journal For Plague Lovers which a member of Wire completely slagged off. So this shows how much I actually like this album, because he obviously hated us and thought were just plod-rocking, rock-dinosaur philistines. But despite that I'm still going to quote this as a really influential album for me. A lot of people pick Pink Flag and Chairs Missing as their favourite records, but for me this is the apex of their achievement: they're still fusing really blunt-edge experimental rock with really abstract notions and wild ideologues and monologues of different sorts. There's a song on there called 'The 15th' which is just an amazing song; there's another song called 'The Other Window', which has a direct lineage from some of the Velvet Underground narrated songs like 'The Gift', and it's about this guy travelling on a train and outside there's an animal dying in a barbed-wire fence. There's another song called 'Two People In A Room' which is just fucking brutal. A lot of people like Wire then they're bleak or when people couldn't get a handle on what they were saying, but I think on this you can pin down the emotion to the record, pin down the marriage of experimental edge with rock. For me, it's one of the great lost post-punk records. It's an amazing record that never really gets written about. It was produced by Mike Thorne who never did as good a record again. And I just love the cover: it's got a very… almost Mondrian kind of vibe to it. It's really strange and quite unsettling. I just love the record."

"I was never that big a U2 fan actually! The others, especially Dominic [Scott] who left before we got a record deal, were massive fans. He was a great guitarist - I think Keane would be a really different animal had Dominic stayed with us, he’s a brilliant guitarist. He basically just played a bit like The Edge meets Jonny Greenwood. And the others would harp on about U2, I was a bit younger and I was still into the Beatles and Queen, but Achtung Baby, of all of their records, is my favourite. It’s quite exposed, I suppose. I think that The Edge was getting divorced when they wrote that record and a lot of the songs were trying to make sense of that mess. But my favourite U2 song is 'Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses' and it’s really weird because that has the best middle eight that has ever been written - it might even be like 32 bars long! It’s a total heart-stopping moment, it’s vintage U2, it drops down with Bono doing his posturing, rock star thing, and then it builds and builds and launches into that great chorus. It’s classic U2, all quite pretentious. One of my problems with U2 is that it can sometimes smack of bad school poetry from time to time! I remember someone saying to me, “Oh that line about playing Jesus to the lepers in your head was the greatest line every written in a pop song!”. That’s the fucking lamest line I’ve ever heard! We met Steve Lillywhite when we signed our record deal, he produced that song, and we were saying, "Tell us about 'Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses'", and he was like, “Oh, I’ve got nothing but bad memories about that song! We couldn’t ever get it to work!”"