"He's a Swedish multi-disciplinary artist. I chose that to represent all of my friends, composers and people that I know who make extraordinary experimental work. On one hand it is a drone, and it's a really fantastic drone. It's a copper pipe on a pillar driven by it's own amplification - it's a fantastic sound. The other part is a reading of an autopsy of a Dutch queen when she dies. It's an old autopsy so it's got this great formality: it talks about the 'colouration' of the skin. The poetry is in the age of the language. It's something that's absolutely fascinating but it also has no relevance, all it is is about it. It's a composition, it's a piece of imagination. One could mention 'The Gift' by The Velvet Underground. I remember the first time hearing that and it was split in stereo and thinking: 'God that's extraordinary'. Why do I not always sing my own lyrics? It seems to fit better to me. It's the proof that sometimes it's a good idea not to think about things too carefully. The way things roll is sometimes good. It's a funny thing to Wire, it's not what we thought about, it was a practical solution to a time when we were in need of writing material. I never learned to play the guitar, and it turned out to be an incredible device, this distancing, which threw it into interesting spaces. It gives it a theatrical quality that's not drama theatrical, but theatrical in the same way as you'd have with someone like Pinter, where you'd have very normal speech but because of the context that you put things into, suddenly you have something that's quite peculiar."

"I'd already bought the single, 'He's Misstra Know It All' and played that to death. I bought this album on the day that it came out in Woolworth's, when I was on holiday in Eastbourne. And then I had to wait a week to listen to it. I spent that time reading the back cover about Moogs, ARPs and other synth sounds and I didn't even know what those words meant! My imagination was quite engaged because he seemed to have played all of the instruments and that was unusual back then. But I've always liked records that have that much of a one-man stamp on them. The sound of Innervisions was different from what was around at that point. There wasn't anything that sounded as colourful as this album. These new synthesizers sounded sensuous and they were moving in a very animalistic way while being chest-resonators with humanistic kind of sounds. It was fascinating when I was first getting into music. It was a more sophisticated kind of pop music compared to what was going on at that point. All these complicated chords that Stevie Wonder was using were very intriguing to me. The sonics on this album really hit me and some tracks are more fruity than others. Then you had tracks like 'Visions', which are more jazzy and quite guitar-orientated. They gave me feelings that I didn't understand as a teenager, and even after over 40 years, Innervisions keeps on giving. I keep going back to it because it's got so many emotional layers: there's anger there, there's tenderness and there's a lot of commitment to the music. Stevie Wonder seemed more real and that was something you could align yourself with."

"I got to love this album when I was 18, working in a second hand clothes shop in Glasgow, where one of the guys I worked with played it constantly. It was the first time I had heard music that felt like genuine contemporary protest music. The combination of Chuck D’s informed eloquence and unashamed confrontational stance was so potent. Here was a guy name-checking Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in the same breath as Coltrane and Anthrax. It was revolutionary in every sense. It felt dangerous. These guys had the FBI tapping their phones and were taking on the behemoth of the US establishment. While in retrospect the S1Ws may be the campest paramilitaries in history, the imagery of guerrilla conflict intensified the sense of resisting persecution. Like the best groups, it felt like a gang, too. Flav the joker, Chuck the boss, Terminator-X voiceless, but ever-present. Tight. Then there was the music. That fragmented repetition. Those bursts of brass and breakbeats, squealing like sirens against stolen guitars. Amazing. It didn’t sound like anything else. While Chuck D and his cartoon foil Flavor Flav had the lyrical articulacy, Terminator-X, Professor Griff and the Bomb Squad matched it musically. Their imagination was in context – how to take something from its original context, place it against something else out of context to create something way more powerful than either in isolation. In many ways, I still see this LP as the pinnacle of rap. Of course it is of its time and sonic trends advanced, but for sheer inventiveness and lyricism it has never been matched. It felt like rap was violently booting the world into a better direction – a brief flash of genius before it became mired in the vocabulary of egoism, misogyny and avarice. There have been great pinnacles since, but nothing matches this moment."