"Laurie Anderson I discovered in college along with a whole other collection of artists, like Philip Glass, John Cage and Pauline Oliveros. I took an experimental music class when I was 18, which opened up this entire world of music I'd been missing. In high school I listened to Einsteurzende Neubauten and I'd pick up weird-looking found sound records from the used record bin at my local record store, but this was the first time I'd really studied it. Looking back at the vast majority of music that influenced me as a teenager, 99% of it was by boys. Before, my female influences had been Cyndi Lauper and Madonna and Alison Moyet. But Laurie Anderson was just playing an entirely different game. She was just making the bizarre music that she wanted to. She didn't need to glam up. I just remember looking at the fucking album cover of Big Science and thinking 'This is the coolest fucking woman in the world.' She looks like she gives no shit about what anyone thinks of her, in a way that surpassed Riot Grrrl or anything like that. And the fact that she had a powerhouse intellect and was a storyteller... she set a new bar in my head. She was a performance artist, which was what I wanted to be when I was 18. I imagined that I'd do something with theatre and music, probably both. I never thought as myself as any great shakes as a musician – and I still don't – but I thought of myself as a great creative performer. What Laurie Anderson and Pauline Oliveros were doing was taking the instruments they'd been taught and transmuting them into this beautiful, strange world of art. They were taking that stuff and fucking it up, and that gave me a lot of hope."

"It's a brilliant album. What's not to like? It's universally loved and accepted as an album, as a collection of music. When you're a kid you listen to Beastie Boys because you like to sing '(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)' because it's silly and fun but Paul's Boutique is sophisticated and mature, as well as being really musical, which I really like about it. And long before I had any awareness of what sampling was, all the different bits that they use I was always curious about what they were. I always knew they were from other songs, because some of them I recognised. But it was super fascinating to me. I was already in love with New York and the idea of moving to New York. And in my adolescent fantasy I thought: ""I'm going to graduate high school, I'm going to move out of the house, I'm going to move straight to New York, and then maybe, one day, I'll get to meet one of the Beastie Boys."" And now I've met all of them! James [Murphy] is really good friends with Ad-Rock and he'd be at the studio with us and I'd go there and be with Adam, and eat pizza with Adam. It was so bizarre because 15-year-old me was losing her mind but I had to be cool. But also it was totally normal because he's just a normal guy and he's hanging out with my friend who's just a normal guy and they're doing normal stuff. But no matter how many times I meet them or see them I've never stopped being star-struck. I have to stop myself falling apart."

"""It was a more intense injection of it. That was the second solo album, before the second Wu Tang album, and you can still hear that hunger in RZA's production. It's even more intense and claustrophobic. I didn't buy this album until six years after I discovered the Wu Tang, and it threw me again, I was obsessed with it. I used to have it on in the car all the time and I would stop it and go back to a little bit, then stop it and go back to another little bit, thinking about how I could replicate that, because it was so good. This was well after I came up with Sleaford Mods, just before I met Andrew. It was still so mind blowing. There was a theme to it, they always used to bang on about how it was a concept but I never got that. 'Guillotine' was my favourite one off it, and also 'Incarcerated Scarfaces'. The first one has this Keystone Cop kind of beat. It's bizarre, there's almost an Irish thing to that. It was east coast, you've got a lot of Irish immigrants there, so it must have spread through the culture. I used samples for the first four albums, or tried to, but I don't do it any more. It was just so tired to me, I'd rather leave sampling to those classic albums than flog a dead horse, you know. I was aware of the fact that it was an uphill battle trying to get clearance for stuff, but after three or four albums I was also getting bored of it, trying to find a loop off a great track. It didn't matter how obscure it was or how obscure the approach was, it just bored me and I needed something more home grown."""