"It was difficult to choose a Sparks record. I think Sparks are unique. Even though they’ve progressed through the early seventies ‘Visconti sound’ – it’s not glam rock, it’s something else. It’s of its time because it influenced so much of what came after it. I don’t think it was really like anything before it, but then they progressed and switched to Giorgio Moroder and those early 80s records like Angst In My Pants, and then they went Eurodisco in the nineties too. One of my favourite Sparks songs is 'When Do I Get To Sing ""My Way""'. That captures again that melancholy, it’s such a wonderful, wonderful song but wry with a sense of humour too. Lyrically I think it’s an incredible record because it was at odds with what was going around at the time. You had John Lennon doing the confessional ballad songwriting about 'this is the emotion I feel' and it’s very bare. And then you have the preposterous fantasy of prog rock. Whereas to me they approached lyrics more from the perspective of writing a film script or someone writing a novel, or even more from the Cole Porter type of lyric writing. It was based around characters and there’s extremes of emotion, like the song 'Equator' which ends the record. It’s about arranging to meet someone on a particular place on the equator at a particular time and it sets up this romantic premise, and the character gets there but the other lover isn’t waiting for him. You have this heartbreak and even though Russell is singing it in the first person, it seems to be written from a third person perspective. You have these characters created by Ron for Russell to articulate, in the way a scriptwriter would write to bring a character to life. It’s one of those records I literally wore the groove out to. Ron’s arrangements too, how he got a rock band into play how an orchestra would, but not in a pretentious way at all. The melodies are really direct and cool. It’s a real joy to listen to."

"Tobi Vail, the drummer from Bikini Kill told me about them, and I went to the record store and bought it and I smoked too much pot and listened to it and I was like, "WHAAAAAAAT?!" There was so much in it, and it was not because I was stoned, because then I listened to it not stoned and I still kept finding stuff in it. Sonically they really changed my world and the freedom and the looseness. They were funny, tough and experimental. In my small town there was a certain sound formula that people were doing and I was like, "Man!" I appreciated women being able to experiment outside of these genre boundaries. They sounded so determined and weird to me. They taught me about production. I listened to that album so many times to figure out how it was produced: which side the guitar was panned to, was there a double guitar? I would just sit here and pick it apart in a way that I had never wanted to pick something apart before. To me the sound of that album and the way it was produced was such a great reflection of their material. It just really got me thinking about and being excited about production. This was probably a couple of years into Bikini Kill. There was also a radio interview we heard with them, they were asked about sexism and stuff like that and every time they'd moan and make crazy dog noises because they clearly were always asked about gender and were so sick of it. I'm always trying to be super diplomatic but they were just such awesome brats. Some guy called up and was like, "I'm really interested in your show I can't wait to see it" and they were like, "I'm in the phone box around the corner", just making fun of him like he was some perv. They were fun punks and it's not just about the funniness of it but also about speaking back to power and you can do that through humour."