"I was reading a David Byrne interview and he was talking about Jorge Ben and this album and he talked about this track, 'Hermes Trismegisto Escreveu', and he loved the groove of it. I think it was about the time he was working with Brian Eno on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts and there's a track called 'Regiment', for which he admitted he took the groove from that Jorge Ben track. And I loved My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts so I then tracked down África Brasil, explored it and loved it. It's weird - I want to give it more credit than it being just a party album or a dinner party album or a tour bus aftershow album, because it is more than that, but that's how I've always listened to it. It's a real go-to record for any kind of little party that I might have but musically it's not in any kind of box. It makes me feel good and I think that combination of South American and African music makes you realise that there's more to it. It has a real gravitas and weight behind it. There's a real importance about this record. Have I explored these rhythms? It's a tricky one. Supergrass did a few times. Something like 'Kiss Of Life' explored a kind of Talking Heads/Tom Tom Club/Jorge Ben vibe but you have to be careful as well; music shouldn't have any boundaries, but you have to be aware of what school you're from. You know, I don't think I'd make a particularly good rap album but I fucking love listening to it. But it's totally different listening to it. I have this view that, just because it feels great and it's fun to play, it doesn't mean that anybody wants to hear you play that. There has to be a point when you have a look at what you're good at and how the music can speak in the right way. It's a real fine line between being yourself and satisfying your pleasures but being aware that not everybody will want to hear that. But I'll tell you what - while I wasn't necessarily going for those kinds of beats from Jorge Ben and records like that, it was more the sounds and the approach and the rhythmic ideas that I was playing around with in the studio and looping a lot of stuff. I was sampling stuff from around the studio and playing beats on weird objects and then looping it. 'Oscillate' on Matador came from this little loop box that I've got and a lot of that was inspired by the vibe of African percussion and sounds and you can hear the room and the air around it. I can't be proficient in that world but I can take different elements from it that I appreciate sonically."

"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."