"I kept reading about punk, but the local radio station wouldn’t play punk; they didn’t think it was real music. That led to me one of the musical discoveries of my life. One night, I really wanted to hear what this punk music was and, turning the radio dial, I heard John Peel’s radio show. I started listening to it and taking songs off there all the time, and that became my musical education. It made me want to form a group; the early Pulp were really just a ragbag of the influences that we’d picked up from listening to John Peel’s show every night. The first Devo album came out that year [in 1978], and I went to see them play at the City Hall in Sheffield, which was quite influential. One of the first songs that Pulp learned how to play was the Devo song “Gut Feeling.” A couple of years later, when we first did some recordings, I took them to John Peel—he used to do these road shows at colleges, and I just went along to the one he did in Sheffield and hung around and gave him the tape after when he was putting all his records back into his DJ box at the end. He listened to it on the way home, and that really changed my life. Then he gave us a session [in 1981]. We were all still at school. I was 16 or maybe just 17, and the drummer was 15 and he looked about 12. He could hardly reach the bass drum pedal to play the drum."

"Rock Lobster' was the first song I heard from it, I think from John Peel. I didn't listen to the record for a long time because the club I went to in Sheffield, an alternative indie club called The Limit, always played either 'Rock Lobster' or 'Planet Claire' every single night for three years that I went there. You would hear that, 'Bela Lugosi's Dead' by Bauhaus, 'Shack Up' by A Certain Ratio, 'She Sells Sanctuary' by The Cult, 'This Is The Day' by The The... nowadays the guy could have been a Spotify playlist, he hardly ever deviated and God knows why he turned up and put them on by hand, but he did. That was the only place to go if you were considered a bit of a weirdo."

"John Barry is probably my number one, I got him to play Meltdown when I did that. I was trying to get him to play more obscure stuff from his catalogue but he wasn't into it at that point in his life. I like this album because you've got his soundtrack stuff and then you've got songs like 'Old Man Willow' that sound like Broadcast. Soundtracks don't always work as albums because they tend to repeat the theme so much that they're not that exciting to listen to, but this one doesn't do that. I think there's one song I'm not that bothered of, 'He Quit Me' at the end of side one, but it just works as an album. There was a record shop in Sheffield called Rare & Racey that only closed down a couple of years ago, you could get pretty cheap second hand records and I picked this up there and played it to death. It probably did have an influence on Pulp, I really liked the sound of it. It's not so much on this record but he used a dulcimer on The Ipcress Files soundtrack, and that definitely influenced the Pulp song 'I Spy', there was a definite attempt to make it sound like that in the background. "