"She's going to represent all the new. This is what we like, new electronic music. Rock music is boring, absolutely boring. How many times have we been bored with it, that's the question. It's really odd, that feeling that you step out of the room. What's interesting about it? Rock music doesn't captivate me. It's faintly ridiculous isn't it? Men with guitars. When we started Wire we thought about how the group would be on stage and how we'd behave. We thought: 'This is a good area to exploit, we can take the piss.' There's got to be a sense of pushing it to almost folly or failure, try again. Now you get things like Inga Copeland, people who are really fucking wilful about what they're doing. It's like: 'Fuck you'. Klara's not like that, but she's very much, 'This is what I am doing, that's it'. She has this manifest confidence, that always helps when you're listening to something. I think because she's processing field recordings and found sound it's got what seems to me to be a very organic feel, in the way she composes things. She deeply understands the importance that things sound right tonally. I've seen her playing in a few different spaces, and her music has translated for all of them."

"In Gleaners And I, what’s around you is what you survive on – it’s a kind of contemporary foraging that they’re doing. I thought of that, and Agnes [Varda, the director] was on my mind because, A) she passed away when I was making a film, and B) they brought back a print of Vagabond before I was shooting. I was in New York and I saw Lady Bird and the theater was packed and there was so much hype about Lady Bird at that time. Then I walked up and I saw Vagabond in this not-so-full theater and saw a print of it. I thought, “Oh my God, the inventiveness of that film and the sort of circular motion of it and how she just decides to let people talk to the camera at a point, even though she’s in this narrative!” Anyway, just her confidence to be so inventive with narrative form. She’s so inspiring. How she moved in and out of documentary and narrative and how her docs have such narrative threads in them and her narratives… she just opens the door, and it’s like, “OK, now you’re going to talk to these real people that aren’t actors,” and she is just very fluid between those two. I admire those things about her work so much."

"An incredible record that sounds as modern today as it did when it first emerged. I was really struck just by this minimalist production and the atmosphere they captured on this record. It's just been one of these records that I go back to over and over again and it's been a real touchstone in my career. I just think it's so beautiful and so tastefully constructed. Again, it's also so unique. There's nobody else who has ever touched them. 

 They've made this insanely perfect record – and I rarely say that, that it is a perfect record – and I associate it with the emergence of myself as an adult where it just felt like a whole different universe than what I had experienced before. It sounded like a whole different planet. 

 I don't even know how to articulate why I love it so much, other than it is a perfect recording. I guess the aesthetic of Colossal Youth is that it is so disciplined. You don't really hear that very often, that real confidence just to let things be really simple and unembellished: it takes a lot of balls to do that [laughs]. I feel too that any new generation that was exposed to that record would find it as thrilling as I did back in the 1980s; you can't really say that about too many records."