"I first encountered Kate Bush through 'Wuthering Heights'. I remember my sister rushed out and bought that single in 1978 so I was very aware of her. The Sex Pistols and Kate Bush were my formative music, not The Smiths and David Bowie, that came later. For me Hounds Of Love is the biggest influence on [Suede's] Dog Man Star. I love the way it's a record of two halves, and the second half is a concept record about fear of drowning. It's an amazing record to listen to really late at night, unsettling and really jarring. I always wanted to make a record that was a concept album but not in an ELP sense. I wanted to make one that had a musical coherence, and wasn't just ten songs stuck together but had this sense of journey, that took the listener to a new world. And that's the impact Hounds Of Love had on Dog Man Star."

"When I first heard Ariel Pink, I was very homesick for LA and was kind of depressed and miserable in the Midwest, which I love, I should add. It had nothing to with the Midwest: it was just the circumstances. This record was one of many things that reminded me that I needed to come back home to LA. There was something about the sound, the love for moving around, both physically and within the music, the sense that you could go wherever you wanted to go in terms of melodies and harmonies. I totally related to the freedom, the crazy characters that are in the songs. I had started recording and I found myself really interested in his passion for building characters in songs. I love his music to this day because he does that so well. Again, it was important for me at a particular time and it continues to be."

"I only heard this for the first time about six years ago. It was just like this culmination of melody… like the way he… Why do I love it? I don't know. What I love about his music is the playfulness, the way he plays with words, his sense of humour. There's no clear obvious harmony, no clear obvious arrangements. It's very individual: it doesn't sound like a particular style. It has, actually, a little bit of a jazz style, because he was coming out of jazz: that was his love. It's like he's this poet who's finding the music that will fit for each song. It's kind of how I approach my music, too. You're not looking at it like, "This song is going to be this kind of song"; it's more like: "This song is about this and so maybe I'll make these sounds with it." It's a much more playful approach to music. I like that. I identify with that a lot."