"They were very theatrical. Alex Harvey was 40 something, he was an old guy. And - at the time - that was ancient for rock n roll. He won the Scottish Tommy Steele competition in 1957. The prize? Meeting Tommy Steele! What a bizarre business. That was two years before I was born and he must have been in his late teens/early 20s by then. To be in your early 40s and starting out was unheard of. David Bowie and Alex Harvey knew each other, actually: they bonded over a shared love of Jacques Brel. 'Faith Healer' is one of the best things that ever came out of the 70s. And the end triplet of 'Last Of The Teenage Idols' – which is about the competition that he won. That was amazing. I loved his voice: he screamed his way through life. His version of 'Crazy Horses' is hilarious. He did a song called 'There's No Lights on the Xmas Tree Mother… They're Burning Big Louis Tonight'. It was about a guy in the electric chair who takes all the power off the grid on the night of his death. Nobody in this little town in America gets the Xmas lights. What a brilliant idea for a song. It was theatrics and bravado. Alex Harvey was off kilter - it wasn't like The Sweet or Mud, he was musically brilliant."

"Me and Rick were living in a terraced house in Splott in Cardiff, near Tiger Bay. That’s where we formed our first band, Freur. We were making dub electronics and listening to dub reggae and Kraftwerk’s Computer World and Bowie’s Low. What blew us away was Brian’s (Eno) analogue electronic sound – that kind of degraded sound that he was making – and the fact that this great icon, a hugely famous singer and frontman, had chosen not to sing for half an album. What guts and courage that seemed to take. Years later you read that it ended up like that because he wasn’t around and that Brian experimented in his absence. But it takes great foresight and courage for David to come back and hear that and say, "yep, that’s the album." And not to think that because he’s a singer he has to blast away over the top of it. So that became a part of the blueprint for Underworld – that the singer doesn’t have to be the dominant force. He can play a supporting role. That Berlin period – the three Bowie albums and the Iggy Pop record – deepened the mythology of what I love about Berlin. The idea of going to a place and locking yourself away and making quite an extreme record in a different environment"

"It's got to be Trans-Europe Express really. I was aware of Autobahn and that was like The Beach Boys from outer space, engineered by Conny Plank - that was what they called it in those days, it was a blur between engineering and producing. I think Trans-Europe Express consolidated that futuristic thing, and of course it had a namecheck for David Bowie and Iggy Pop in there, which was an endorsement in some way. Although they were German, they were aware of 'our world'. I think the only other German thing I'd heard of before that were Faust, and the reason I know about them was they brought an album out [The Faust Tapes] and it cost about 15p or something, so everyone bought it. 'The Hall Of Mirrors' is really dark! The album's quite song-y as well. With The Man-Machine, it had the perfect record cover, it was the whole red-ness. Futuristic art deco with a slight Hitler Youth edge to it, a sinister edge. I went down to London one time, down the King's Road - I think it was the week of release - and every single shop was playing it. However Man-Machine is everybody's album, whereas Trans-Europe Express is a more private album, which wasn't as widely known. I hadn't taken any drugs at the time, but it affected me. That line, ""Even the greatest stars dislike themselves in the looking glass"", it was all just very atmospheric."

"I somehow remember hearing the first Human League album that has 'Being Boiled' on it, and just being amazed at how strange it was. Then when they started Heaven 17 it was the most odd, phenomenal pop music. At times it seemed as if they were choosing to be really poppy and commercial, and they were really good at it, and other times of their own free will and volition, they were trying to be like mutant pop stars. Then the BEF, and I feel old dating myself like this, it first came out as a cassette and it was very rare for an artist to release an album on cassette. There was one song on there, I think it's called 'The Decline Of The West' and it still stands as one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard. That particular instrumental somehow wormed itself into my DNA. There are certain songs like that, 'Heroes' by David Bowie, 'Atmosphere' by Joy Division, I remember as a young 15-year-old musician thinking to myself 'all I want to do is aspire to make music that's 50% as good as this'. It seemed utterly absurd to try and make music as good as this, because that would be impossible, but I thought it might be a realistic challenge to make music half as good. Thank you for asking me to do this. Now I'm going to go and listen to all these records."