"That moment I had when I was young, listening to White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground… I mentioned there's a song called 'The Gift', and John Cale narrates it. It's about a man who mails himself to his girlfriend as a present. She opens it, and she fucking kills him. I remember… I didn't realise John Cale was Welsh when I was 15. I remember listening to that song and I was like, "Fuck me! That sounds like a Welsh voice!". My mind exploded: one of the pivotal members of The Velvet Underground was a Taff! Anything is possible baby… I really got into John Cale from that moment onwards. I think if you get into John Cale you go to Paris 1919, which is an amazing album and some would say his best, but Slow Dazzle really pushes it for top spot. Number one, it has one of the best covers of all time: he does a cover of 'Heartbreak Hotel' which is a brilliant, brilliant cover. And he goes from that to 'Ski Patrol', and there's another song called 'I'm Not The Loving Kind', which is almost like a Harry Nilsson, beautifully orchestrated, melancholic plea to a lover. So he goes from serrated acuteness of 'Heartbreak Hotel' to the lushness of 'I'm Not The Loving Kind', which is just one of the great motivational songs of all time. In a strange way it just motivates you so much. This is where John Cale got his game together: he realised he was an experimental musician who could also write amazing tunes. And this is where you actually hear him not scared of his voice anymore. This was the start of his true greatness. As a solo artist he's nearly unsurpassable to me."

"I've never seen them live, but I've seen loads of footage of them performing live. 'Hotel California' is an incredible track, or at least I think so. It's like a best of American rock, or country rock or whatever you want to call it, it's the perfect example of that genre. It's got perfect harmonies, really good songs. I love watching them with their double necked guitars and shit like that, it's just really professional, really impressive, something that I could never do. It's an admiration thing. I got into The Eagles late, about 1990 or something. I started hearing them a lot on the radio, I'd known their songs but hadn't paid any attention to them in any detail. Then when I started listening to them properly, I thought, ""Yeah man, that's pretty damn cool"". Living in America it's been interesting to discover that there's a much bigger alternative scene here than I imagined there was. I live in Brooklyn and there's a big electronic scene here, lots of people doing experimental music. The whole thing started with electroclash really, I loved that [chuckles], it was so cheeky. Since I did that record [VCMG] with Martin Gore I've been listening to a lot of techno stuff, it's not one particular artist, but I'm on Beatport every day. It's quite a revelation, I was quite out of touch with electronic music, but now I'm finding loads of new stuff. I'm working on another collaboration record, with various DJs and mixers, it's quite a long project, but I thought that rather than work with an individual it'd be interesting to get different people, get different angles on the music. Hopefully when Martin comes off tour and has a bit of time we could do another record together, because I really enjoyed doing the last one."

"In the late 70s, I was moving to New York and I was inspired by all this stuff coming out of CBGB’s, and Talking Heads was one of the hugest influences at that time. I started to read about them, and I guess when I heard that record I wasn’t really sure what I thought of it. Some weeks later they came through Binghamton, New York where I was in University. This was the first tour they did after Jerry Harrison joined the band, it must have been late ‘77 or early ‘78 they were still touring in a station wagon, I remember seeing them drive up and they were playing this same little pub out the edge of the campus that my band were playing. As soon as I saw them it was like everything clicked. This was one of the most impressive concerts I’d ever seen and all of a sudden their music became super important to me. I’ve been listening to a lot of their records recently. I was going to choose Fear Of Music because that’s the record I’ve been listening to again right now and I’ve always thought that was their obscure third record but I didn’t realise it had ‘Life During Wartime’ on it and stuff like that and ‘Cities’, but they were such an incredible, experimental band. That period of music –Talking Heads and Elvis Costello and Television and Devo’s first record, those records all seemed to define a new period of music for me and it wasn’t exactly punk, it wasn’t ‘God Save The Queen’ or ‘Tommy Gun’ or whatever The Clash were coming out with (which was also really strong), it just struck me as art music for the era."