"This is a period of transition, which all of those early albums were. If you look at Bowie between 1967 and 1970/1 there was no constant in his life, whether he was a mod, whether he was going through his Dylan period with Space Oddity, God knows what The Man Who Sold The World is… it's like a prog heavy metal album really… He was changing the whole time. But if you look at Hunky Dory, I think he just thought that his future was as a songwriter as well as a performer, because I've also heard that The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars was his last crack at [becoming famous]. And the amazing thing about this album was two weeks after he finished it he was back in the studio doing Ziggy Stardust. There was a two week gap between the studio visits for those two records and they're so radically different from each other. So I think Bowie just thought, 'Right I'm having one last crack at being a pop star and I've written all these great songs.' And they are great songs on this album, 'Bewlay Brothers', 'Quicksand', 'Life On Mars'… When he wrote this song he'd just put in to write the lyrics for 'My Way' for Frank Sinatra and he got rebuffed and was really pissed off about it. So he wrote that song to say, 'This is what I can do.' And it is a great song: one of the greatest songs ever. I think he wrote it genuinely thinking that one day someone like Frank Sinatra would record a version of it."

"You have to remember that this came out when I was 10 years old, and my brothers started smoking pot and listening to that all the time. So we lived a lot of our young intense lives with all that cool Led Zeppelin shit playing. But when I hear Led Zeppelin IV, I guess that's where I discovered that idea of a rock group. So for me, Led Zeppelin never really evokes anything other than these dudes playing this bad ass music. Of course, it's impossible to really play like Led Zeppelin. I mean, they're a total fabrication of sounds and moods and little arranging techniques, little quirks. Jimmy Page is a master of that. It's a magical combination of, what, eight songs? When you listen to them altogether, which we do quite often, I don't see how anyone who loves music could listen to that and not think, 'Fuck, that's cool'. Such cool drumming, such cool effects on the guitars. Robert Plant... it's a weird way he sings. People have accepted it now, but it's a weird screech. So high, with so much velocity, he's really singing at the peak of his energy. That is driving the music. You can't take Robert Plant's screeching out of that and get the same effect. It's just what the song is. That song 'Rock N Roll' [sings] "been a long time since I rock 'n rolled"... if you don't sing it like that, it doesn't have the same effect. He screams that shit with that freaky echo on his voice, it's like some truth from beyond. It's fucking amazing. It's still amazing."

"I found out about the Cardiacs and discovered A Little Man And A House And The Whole World Window and On Land And In The Sea simultaneously. They’re very hard to find now, the CDs are going for upwards of 60 or 70 quid on eBay. It’s progressive music, but done in a really mental way. It sounds like one guy’s mind being acted out by some willing and accomplished musicians. It’s really insane. There are loads of tempo changes. I think Tim Smith’s voice sounds a little like Robert Smith, but in a much more manic way. I think that’s what really speaks to me [laughs]. It’s almost like what progressive rock is made for. You expect progressive rock to be manic. The production sounds a little bit more like a real band on On Land And In The Sea, but on A Little Man And A House And The Whole World Window there’s a song on it called ‘R.E.S.’ which is just seven minutes of strange music. It’s like 60s easy listening music but it’s still definitely prog. I was criticised once actually. We did a trip into the rain forest in Costa Rica last year and I DJed it, and afterwards everyone was like, “yeah that was great… maybe too much Cardiacs though.” It’s a floor filler, but a floor emptier as well – and it’s hard to know where the threshold is! On those albums there are a lot of people called Smith, and I’m not sure whether they’re brothers or cousins or aunties or whatever, but there’s a saxophonist, bassist, guitarist, keys, and it’s all very symphonic. More symphonic than you’d expect."