"A little like David Bowie and his influence, with me being a teenager during the 70s meant I never stopped being affected by Brian's music. If you were a big Brian fan, you would get into a cast of characters - be it T. Rex or Roxy Music or Bowie - and you followed the connections of those artists. Eno managed to stay really intriguing. When Eno's first album - Here Come The Warm Jets - came out, it was a record you only had if you were in the know. It was obscure and underground but I had never gotten into it. I had a couple of friends who were Roxy freaks and bought everything and anything to do with the band and I had a best mate who was obsessed with Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and was playing it all the time. I got to know it really well and it has connected to a lot of records that I like. Arguably, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) was the blueprint for Wire. It was the blueprint for David Bowie's later records and you can hear the proto-Talking Heads on that record. People forget that Eno was omnipresent in the late 70s on collaborations with Bowie, Talking Heads and Devo. If you listen to Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) that makes complete sense. It sounds like all of those bands four or five years before they made similar stuff. 'The True Wheel' sounds like something off Scary Monsters and it is four or five years before. 'Third Uncle' sounds like Talking Heads many years before - so make of that what you will. The idea of using the studio as an instrument, which has become commonplace now with people in their rooms on GarageBand, was a real innovation when Eno was doing it. There was no one else like him at the time. But, it is all about the listening experience and, like the Wire album, when I heard Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and listened to it a lot, it was everything rock music hadn't been up until then. I was making note of that - it was anti-blues, it was anti-rock and it was anti-faux authenticity. It was a long, long way away from Laurel Canyon."

"I’m a huge admirer of Grace Jones in many, many ways. She came out of the fashion industry, made a disco record and then went on to make three classic records that I think are some of the greatest sounding things anyone has ever put out there. Those albums were produced by Alex Sadkin and Chris Blackwell, who had worked with Bob Marley before that. We first worked with Alex Sadkin on ‘Is There Something I Should Know?’ and he went on to produce Seven And The Ragged Tiger and the Arcadia album with me. So, we worked very closely with Alex and the reason we wanted to work with him at all was because of the Grace Jones album. I was so astounded when I heard the sound on Nightclubbing – the depth, quality and clarity of instrumentation and the vibe of it. I couldn’t understand how anyone had ever captured that. I needed to work with this person somehow and fortunately Alex turned out to be one of our great collaborations. Grace combined her style with a reggae influence, with a certain pop sensibility and with grooves that people could dance to and created something that only she could have done. It was entirely original and everyone in Duran Duran loves Grace Jones. We’ve played her records more than most other artists. We got to know Grace and hung out with her quite a lot. She did the Bond movie [A View To A Kill] that we were on the soundtrack for and she is did a cameo on ‘Election Day’ for Arcadia. I also think Grace is one of the most fascinating performers out there. The stuff she used to do with Jean-Paul Goude – the photography, the videos, the album covers – was so stylish. They had great taste. I truly love the songs on Nightclubbing. The original of the title track is on Iggy Pop’s The Idiot - which I love – written by Bowie and Iggy. The song had the darkest vibe you could imagine being done in Berlin during that period and that Grace took it and made it so different and beautiful was really something. Often with a cover you either like the original or the cover – with ‘Nightclubbing’ they are both great."