"When Nick Cave is at his most theatrical the level of interest most people have in him is just elevated. You can feel what they were drinking, you can taste it in the air, you understand what drugs they're on and it's just from sound. It takes a lot to put the other senses into music, and he does it better than anyone else I've ever heard. He's great at every aspect of being Nick Cave, but I think when he's fully involved in story telling he's quite probably the best frontman there is. He really becomes those characters, he's able to live and breathe those people in the way only an author can; he understands them on a different level. This record has some of my favourite lyrics of all time. It's got 'Where The Wild Roses Grow' with Kylie Minogue which is a beautiful ballad, this amazing moment between one of the greatest pop stars of all time and one of the greatest songwriters of all time. It's this mashup that should never have happened, but the world's definitely a better place that it did. I got into Nick Cave late, later than I'd like to admit, when I was in my late 20s. I knew about him before, I'd heard things, but I heard this record when I was living in New York. I wasn't in Gallows any more, I was just painting, and I went record shopping one day. I was buying some Daniel Johnston records but the guy in the shop had a copy of Murder Ballads and I, like a fucking idiot, casually asked 'is this good?' He just said, 'Are you joking? Of course it's good!' So I went back home, listened to my Daniel Johnston records, made some food, then later that night put it on and was like 'holy shit!' and bought every other Nick Cave record they had."

"Well, I grew up in the sixties. In 1962, I bought the first Rolling Stones single, and I still have it. I still have every single they released, in order, right up until Brian Jones was murdered. I saw Pink Floyd god knows how many times, and even did a couple of light shows for them... We started listening to pirate radio and John Peel’s Perfumed Garden, and had a friend at school called Spidey who was very good at spotting interesting new music. John Peel was the first person to play The Velvet Underground, and Spidey said, “Listen to this, you’re gonna love this!”. That’s when we got the first violin. We used to go to Birmingham, to this tiny little record shop that had nothing of interest except some Albert Ayler and free jazz. There was a record in there, and we recognised the artwork from Oz magazine so we knew it was by Hapshash and The Coloured Coat, because they used to do psychedelic posters and Oz. So we bought it just because of that. It was on Magnet Records. When we pulled out [the disc], we were shocked to see that it was on red vinyl, which we’d never seen before. We later discovered that all these people on the scene in London wanted to raise money for the legals fees of John “Hoppy” Hopkins, the first person who’d been busted for drugs and who co-founded the International Times. He was a real mover and shaker of the times. It’s like twenty to a hundred people high on acid jamming! We fell in love with it and still listen to it all the time. When we DJ, people come up to us and ask, “What was that with that great riff?” Guess what one of them ended up doing? Writing “We Are The Wombles”! That really got me in the head, that was worse than a bad acid trip!"