"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!”"

"I think that when this came out I put it in my car and didn’t take it off for six months. Honestly I think this record, at least for me, was one of the influences on us making that first Garbage record. I loved how they reinvented themselves; how they started flirting with electronics and fuzz and beeps and industrial noise yet made these amazing songs. They stirred it all up, threw it against the wall and spat it all out. They redefined themselves and it resulted in what I think is their finest work. At the time I think a lot of people couldn't quite get their head around it and then they went out and did that massive Zoo TV tour, which was quite a sensory experience. You could see that the band were almost making fun of themselves: there's almost a self-deprecation in there, telling us how they were approaching themselves. There's some gritty humour in the songs, I think. We (Garbage) were thrilled to be asked last year to a do a cover of 'Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses' as all of us absolute love that record. When we tried sounding like U2 it didn't work. We needed it to sound like Garbage so, much like U2, we had to sort of reinvent ourselves and take a different slant on it to give it something that we felt comfortable with, which ended up being a whole heap of fun to do! We stripped the verses down and we're all pretty pleased as to how it turned out as we were honoured to have been asked to have been involved. Bono sent us a note and it was lovely; I can't remember exactly what he said but it was something about the way Shirley sang the verses and the bridge making him feel like a peeping Tom. He obviously listened to the track and he got where we were going with it. It was an awesome note."