"Around the same time as The Slits, me and Antonia, when we met, we used to sing 'Vicious'. We were really little and were all ""waaa!"", nutty little girls running around, pretty funny - I doubt I'd want to have met us now! - but we thought we were hilarious. We used to listen to Transformer - he's just extraordinary. He was just fantastic, just grown up with him, so it's hard to find a way to describe exactly what he means to me. I found a book of his lyrics and you can read them and he's just the most extraordinary poet. He's someone else where you can just sit and read his words as much as you can listen to his songs. I met him once and he told me he thought I was a pretty good lyricist! It was one of the Leonard Cohen things that we did - we were sitting next to each other watching Antony [Hegarty] and we chatted and he said that. I always consider that quite a big moment in my life."

"I came across this on the way out to Hoboken to play Maxwell's, and my manager, Geoff Travis, gave it to me as a gift and we put it on the CD player in the van. I was very touched by his gift - he'd thought to give me that record, I was very moved by that. I knew Nina Simone obviously, but I'd never heard her sing like this. It just turned my head - I'm not sure how it's influenced me as a songwriter or as a musician, but again, another album of just classic songs, one after the other, and so much attitude, so much fucking fire. I think, for me, her questions, her lyrics, were just fantastic - from 'Do I Move You?' all the way through. It was a real learning curve of growing up - there's a lot of wisdom in these songs and also a lot of diversity. The music's also pretty hard-hitting: a lot of groove in there, a lot of amazing rhythm. Just an unusual, really surprising record."