"Well, I grew up in the sixties. In 1962, I bought the first Rolling Stones single, and I still have it. I still have every single they released, in order, right up until Brian Jones was murdered. I saw Pink Floyd god knows how many times, and even did a couple of light shows for them... We started listening to pirate radio and John Peel’s Perfumed Garden, and had a friend at school called Spidey who was very good at spotting interesting new music. John Peel was the first person to play The Velvet Underground, and Spidey said, “Listen to this, you’re gonna love this!”. That’s when we got the first violin. We used to go to Birmingham, to this tiny little record shop that had nothing of interest except some Albert Ayler and free jazz. There was a record in there, and we recognised the artwork from Oz magazine so we knew it was by Hapshash and The Coloured Coat, because they used to do psychedelic posters and Oz. So we bought it just because of that. It was on Magnet Records. When we pulled out [the disc], we were shocked to see that it was on red vinyl, which we’d never seen before. We later discovered that all these people on the scene in London wanted to raise money for the legals fees of John “Hoppy” Hopkins, the first person who’d been busted for drugs and who co-founded the International Times. He was a real mover and shaker of the times. It’s like twenty to a hundred people high on acid jamming! We fell in love with it and still listen to it all the time. When we DJ, people come up to us and ask, “What was that with that great riff?” Guess what one of them ended up doing? Writing “We Are The Wombles”! That really got me in the head, that was worse than a bad acid trip!"

"I first met Chris Bear when I was fifteen. We were both at a jazz programme and he was the one person there that was frighteningly talented, just ridiculously talented, I was very intimidated by him. “He introduced me to this and it was one of the first records the two of us bonded over. I didn’t see him again for a few years, but this record was something I kept with me throughout the last few years of high school and I always remembered this amazing drummer who introduced me to it. “That first meeting with Chris Bear has been influential in my music and my life. We were all trying to be cool kids, trading on stuff that we knew and he had this record. There’s a wildness and a subtle funkiness to it, it’s functioning within the bounds of what the genre is but it’s pushing these tiny gradations of feeling. That’s what makes really good jazz really great, it sucks you into these funny little changes in the way that people are playing. It’s so human you feel like you’re in it, like you’re the person making it happen, it’s very physical. “The playing on this is incredibly fiery, Elvin Jones is a classic player and I think Chris Bear’s drumming comes a little bit from his playing at times, but this record is a little bit outside of pure jazz. I feel in our band, and in Chris Bear’s playing, he’s always had that subtlety of feeling, you can play within any one genre, but there’s this lightness of touch and a really subtle dynamic going on. “It takes knowing the right thing to find what’s good in jazz, it’s got a language and a history and it’s easy to hear terrible shit too, I get that. I remember riding around L.A in the back of someone’s car getting really stoned and listening to the whole record was like seeing colours, it was really intense and overwhelming"

"I think I’m going to go with Singles, and it’s because of a very specific time in my life. Soundtrack is really important to me, and I’m a child of ’90s grunge. That movie was Seattle, Nirvana, Pearl Jam — it’s the greatest soundtrack. My favorite band was Smashing Pumpkins and my favorite song by Smashing Pumpkins is “Drown,” and that’s on there. Plus, I loved all the different storylines being woven together. I love Cameron Crowe, and the idea of these people living in Seattle and looking for love. I was a senior in high school when it came out. I mean, I saw it in the theater like three times. I was like, “Oh my God, this is gonna be my life. I’m gonna move out of my parents’ house, and I’m gonna go and try to make it in the city somewhere, and it’s gonna be like this.” And, you know, Bridget Fonda as Janet was just the greatest character. I was like, “I’m gonna be like her. I am kind of like her. But not the pathetic parts of her, the great parts of her.” But everyone was just was trying to find themselves, find love, find a career, find a path, find their life. It was really aspirational for me at the time that it came out, so it really scratches that itch that I had then, and it will always be that meaningful to me. I recently made my husband watch it. I can’t remember if he had seen it or if he just didn’t remember it, but I just could tell, even though he loved it and appreciated it, like, it didn’t kill him the way it killed me. And you know, he was like, “Yeah, no, it’s good. I like it.” But he is obsessed with Almost Famous, and I love Almost Famous, but that was more meaningful for him. Singles is just… the movie, the music, the time, the look, the actors, the wardrobe, the backdrop of Seattle. Just all of it."