"This takes me back to when we were on tour in America with The Bends, and we had all our equipment stolen. We only had three days to buy more. I remember Jonny and I travelling into this guitar shop in San Francisco, where I saw this Telecaster Strat I fell in love with, then me, Colin, Jonny, our soundman and our tech hiring this van to drive six hours north. We had only one cassette to play in it, which had Swervedriver's Ejector Seat on one side and Marvin Gaye's What's Going On on the other. I'd never heard it before. I was like, what is this? Oh my God! All I knew about Marvin Gaye was that he'd been involved in Motown. After this, I got trainspotterish about the album, and its band, The Funk Brothers, and how they made music.

This was really influential on the way I made music from that point. Before that, my bands were Pixies, Nirvana, The Posies and other grunge stuff, but I'd more or less reached a saturation point with all that by 1995. Hearing What's Going On? was like suddenly hearing music in five dimensions; it really made me think about how I wanted to contribute sonically to OK Computer. I thought 'Inner City Blues' was the greatest song I'd ever heard in my life, and it's still up there for me. This music felt like truth. It elevated and transported me. It was music that made me love the music I was trying to make."

"I moved to Austin for college and really loved it. It was a place where there was an arcade that was open 24 hours a day. There were buses going by, and a million people around. And I loved seeing cultures that I just didn’t see in Temple. Right around this time, I started looking into Public Enemy and I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X twice and, well, my eyes were opened quite a bit. There were black people in Temple, but, for instance, at my high school there was a big parking lot, and there was a divider that divided one third of the lot from the other two thirds, though not with any intention, I don’t think. It was just there. But most of the black people in my school parked on that small third, and everybody referred to that parking lot as “Africa.” That didn’t strike me as fucked up in high school, but after reading Malcolm X and listening to Public Enemy, I felt a real drive for there to be more justice and equality. For me, it’s very easy to feel spiritually connected to the underdog and the oppressed. Chuck D is a hero."