"When I first heard the sound of 2-step UK garage coming from London on a trip to the UK in the mid-’90s, I could not wrap my head around it. How could people be dancing to something so disorienting? But then the genre invaded the charts, and there’s no better example to my mind than this perfect piece of pop futurism. It’s till a staple in my DJ sets"

"“What, is he crazy? Should I get a job and destroy the best years of my life?” A boy, a father, a grandfather live in an old house in the woods, spending their days with feeding the tigers they keep in the barn with hot dogs, swimming in the garage they turned into a pool, riding a giraffe. A children’s book far more anarchic than “Pippi Longstocking” —and more fun, too. Also for grown-ups."

"This was a bit of a dodgy situation at the time but I didn’t know that. Tom had asked me to work with him and it was a solo record and that was all I knew. It wasn’t with the group. He used Mike [Campbell, Heartbreakers lead guitarist] for guitar and it was Mike’s studio that we recorded in, in his garage in LA. Tom just stopped me in the street one day in Beverley Hills somewhere and he said, ""I’ve just been listening to George Harrison’s new album. I love it. I’m having a barbecue. Do you wanna come?"" I couldn’t go so he said, ""do you fancy writing some songs together and see what we come up with?"" and I said, ""yeah, I’d love to!"" So I went round his house the next day and after we wrote one, we then wrote, believe it or not, ‘Freefalling’ which was such a big hit for him. So it worked out great and we carried on doing them in Mike’s garage, which was an amazingly sparse studio. It was a garage full of motorbikes and oil cans and bedsteads and things like that - it was pretty amazing! Where him and George looking for that panoramic ELO sound? Well, it wasn’t always that panoramic a sound. I was gradually quietening that sound down that ELO had done and there were less strings. In ELO, it used to be a case of, ""oooh! String day tomorrow!"" and then by about the tenth album it became [adopts dismayed voice] ""oh, fucking hell! It’s string day tomorrow."" I’d had enough of them. I grew tired of the strings. But that’s not why they asked me. It was more the punch I was doing later on and they just liked the sound that I made, whatever it was. They liked something about it."

"Obviously, I'd been listening to hip hop since the mid-80s and kept half an eye on all that stuff as it grew. I was involved in rave culture really early, Spiral Tribe raves and stuff like that and clubbing in Leeds in the early 90s. There was always this really hard UK Garage sound that was great. I loved it. Wiley's come from being a kind of garage MC, one of those guys we listened to on pirate radio in Leeds. He's still got that really underground sound, the way he spits and he never loses that energy either. I was listening to his first album the other day and it still sounds like the future to me. It sounds so contemporary. When you actually analyse grime rhythms, a lot of it is from Nubian rhythms and a lot of the scales are Nubian scales, Algerian scales. When you hear grime, it just sounds like someone's car in the street in London. But then you analyse it and you realise there's all these global influences - it sounds like the whole world. This is what I wanted Melt Yourself Down to be. I wanted to try and create a sound that felt like the whole world."

"I grew up in Seattle with seven older siblings, so I grew listening to their records, and the first record I learned to play was The Witch by The Sonics, a band from Tacoma, Washington. If you were from Seattle and you loved rock you had to have a Sonics record. I thought it was a song about a real witch - I didn't know it was a song about some guy's bad girlfriend. But the record did change things for me. It was just screaming all the way through, and it left its imprint. It was garage rock, although I didn't know that at the time."

"The third choice is a song from Boston, from the band Boston, called "Peace of Mind". And it’s not my all-time favorite song. It’s just one day many years ago, I was in the garage of my apartment, wrenching on my pickup truck, one Sunday night. And there used to be a popular syndicated show, I think it was called Rock Line, and they would get these musicians on and they would talk about their music and their songs. Not too much differently from what we’re doing now. And they had the guy from Boston on, and they said, "What is 'Peace of Mind?' What was that song about?" And the guy said, "I had a good job. I worked for IBM. I had things. You know, I had medical and dental, but I didn’t have peace of mind. I wanted to play music. So I quit my job, and I started this band. And I threw all caution to the wind, and I decided to roll the dice, and give it a try." I was sitting in my garage, when I was like 23, working on my pickup truck thinking, “Do I want to do construction forever? Or maybe I want to give comedy a try.” And it was sort of at that moment, I decided to do comedy. Now, I didn’t make a nickel for the next decade, but at a certain point it worked out."