"That first McCartney solo record was an eye-opener. I was aware that The Beatles were breaking up and I was aware that McCartney was bringing out a solo record and, song after song it was, you know, decent! The production wasn't like Beatles production, but it was decent enough. The playing wasn't as good as Beatles playing, but it was good enough. Then I found out that he wrote, engineered, produced, played all the background - except Linda would show up here and there - it was a one-man band. I mean everything! Drums, keyboards, everything, then engineered it, then produced it, did it all. Unbelievable! He only had these four machines with these RCA knobs, very primitive equipment. It's a real tour de force. He's not a great guitar player, not a bad guitar player, he plays just good enough to be able to get those parts down. It just comes down to song writing. You've got 'Junk', or ""Maybe I'm amazed by the way you love me all the time"" - that could have been a Beatles song! There's another great story in how he and Lennon would work together and McCartney would bring songs to Lennon and Lennon would pooh-pooh them and one of those songs was a song called 'Woman'. McCartney brought it and Lennon said, 'That's not great'. So then McCartney said: 'Look I'm going to prove it to you, I'll give it to Peter and Gordon and they'll have a number one record.' Lennon purportedly said, 'Yeah, but that's because your name is Paul McCartney.' And McCartney says, 'Okay I'll change the name to Bernard Webb', and, sure enough, he gives it to Peter and Gordon and... number one. He did it again with Badfinger, brought in another song that Lennon purportedly said wasn't good enough, called 'Come And Get It'. I mean, what the fuck is it? Anyway, another number one song."

"For the rest of these songs we’re closer to now. My Father-in-law introduced me to this, he’s not a musician by trade but he grew up in the hippy era and was really into blues. He has all of these reference points, music that went totally over the head of my generation. The reference points from that period for my generation are a totally different set of people, Jimi Hendrix or music that even my Father-in-law didn’t know at the time, like the Jim Sullivan record that people are digging out as an undiscovered gem. “I would never have discovered Charlie Musselwhite but for my Father-in-law. He was excited that I was a musician and we could hang out and talk about records, sometimes it doesn’t work and his taste will veer in directions that I totally can’t get into, but he’s introduced me to some great music that I love, like Professor Longhair records. ""I heard this in 2009, after Veckatimest and it was really striking because it’s so straight-up and straightforward. It’s the most minimal 6/8 blues tune and it’s very simple, the drums, organ and guitar line don’t change, the harmonica does the melody and a simple solo and that’s it. There’s these beautiful little contained elements, all the sounds are super lush and it’s another kind of subtlety, the attention to tone is so specific. It’s really elegant and hip, but in a totally different realm, a blues perspective from a totally different era, it’s like what Beach House would have been if they were a blues band in 1962. “It’s not trying to do anything revolutionary, it’s just exactly what it is, great playing without trying to be great playing. It’s so personal and visceral and sometimes you really need that sort of music. It’s the simplicity and soulfulness, it’s so minimal and especially going into Shields we started talking about that more and more, having that sense of space"

"This record was 1958 and it was already a 25-year retrospective so that means it spans from 1932/3 to 1958! It came to me at the same time as all this new wave stuff and I was really interested in all the stuff Cage was doing with prepared piano, and there’s a bunch of prepared piano on my new record. Between those pieces and orchestral works for multiple players where Cage was using people banging on metal break drums and stuff, it was really sounding like the gamelan music I was listening to at the same time and I just found it to be super inventive. John Cage was defining a new way of thinking about music in the 20th century and in a way his definition included all of noise and all of ambient sound and all of these things that became movements for us in the 20th century, like Eno’s whole discreet music and ambient thing; or noise music from extreme harsh Japanese noise to whatever we called Neubaten or what Sonic Youth were doing, if you called that noise music; or the Boredoms or Merzbow which is more extreme, there’s no singing, there’s no guitars, it’s just harsh noise – this music opened the door for all that stuff. It’s amazing music in it’s own right, and yet some of it also explores really low volume like super quiet aspects of music where background sounds and people coughing – well that’s part of what you’re hearing in the experience too. So I felt like that record is so important that it defined a gargantuan giant of the 20th Century, which is John Cage, but it defined all these different bits of music that even if people later didn’t realise their music stemmed from that, in some way it did. Everything from 60s onwards, no matter what you were doing outside of rock & roll there was some kind of influence from Cage there."

"When I did ‘Setting Sun’ with The Chemical Brothers it was based loosely on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Do you remember when it went to number one, what song we knocked off the top? ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’ by Deep Blue Something. We were like Sir Galahad. 'And she said, 'What about Breakfast At Tiffany's' and I said, ‘I remember the movie.'' And we came in, 'Off with your head you piece of shit.' Revolver was when the sitars really started to come in with The Beatles, and all the backwards stuff on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. It’s their first drug album. The drums sound great on it and it’s a masterclass of how to make guitar pop. That’s just it. They took what the Beatles had been, they did Revolver and then the next week they’re making ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. They’re a completely different band. It’s a cliché to talk about it now because it’s so well-known but this is a mindblowing album. I went to see the premiere of the George Harrison film the other night [Martin Scorsese documentary Living In The Material World] and on the red carpet outside this journalist asked me this question: 'Would you say that The Beatles have been an influence on your music?' I was that amazed I had to take my shades off. I said, 'Is that a serious question?' And he was only young and in all innocence he said, 'Yes. Why?' I was like, 'Are you having me on?' And he was like, 'No.' Now ignoring the fact that it’s me, if you’re in a band and you’re playing guitar, you have been influenced by The Beatles. That really is all you need to know. The psychedelic stuff they did after this was mindblowing and the Fab Four mop top stuff before this was equally as good but on this record it all came together."