"I heard them when I was touring with Bikini Kill and had started hanging out in New York. They're from the Bronx and I was learning about the sampling of their song 'Moody', one of the most sampled songs to date. With them it's again the sound that made me go, "Wow!" The production was really interesting, that you could make this very sparse dance music; it's just a bassline and drums. I can't really remember who introduced me to ESG, probably my boyfriend at the time. It might also have been Adam Horovitz from the Beastie Boys who now I'm married to. Or maybe Tobi Vail gave me a tape before that. I saw their reunion show in NY, it was one of their first reunion shows, and two of their daughters were on stage. Then we got to tour with them. We were really nervous around them. I love how the singer's voice can sound so sweet and angry at the same time, like, "I'm just a regular woman, a regular gal." I always wanted to be just a woman in band; I just didn't know I was going to have to work so hard to make it okay for me to be that. Now in my 40s I finally don't have to make every single song about, "Go women go!" For me, one of the biggest achievements of my life has been having this experimental band from 2005 telling me, "Oh we just felt we didn't have to sing about feminism because you already did that." They just got to sing about whatever they wanted and try these really interesting melodic and dissonant things."

"I guess it was originally two EPs, put together in one record. I don't have the original versions but the songs all feel like one record and it's kind of them at their catchiest. They were always a little bit creepy. Some of the other things that came out on Ralph Records like Renaldo and The Loaf were wackier but there was a creepiness to The Residents that I found very, very appealing. Do you know Long Gone John, the label boss from Sympathy For The Record Industry? I went down to visit him at his house in Long Beach. This band I was in, Bloodloss, was on tour and we all went over there because he released a couple of our records. We went to his house and he was just a massive collector of crazy rock stuff and also that kind of juxtaposed art, like Robert Williams paintings. The Residents came up and his eyes lit up. He was like, ""Come here, follow me"" and he took us to this back room, opened up a safe and pulled out a copy of Santa Dog their first record. He prized that so much he kept it in a safe!"

"One of the classic albums. Played it to death. I was pissed off when it came out, it was when the Bunnymen had just split up and it would have inspired me with the band. When he gets it right, Michael Stipe, he’s just brilliant. It’s not that kind of American music that makes you feel queasy like The Eagles, it’s more indie. When you go to America and see some of the natural beautiful vastness of the country, it moves you onto your kneecaps, the prairie beauty of it. ‘Find The River’ - when I heard that it was instant choking up. I went up to my missus at the time and didn’t know if I could speak. I wrote ‘Nothing Ever Lasts Forever’ after it. I don’t know if it was inspired by it. It made me like a type of American that I’ve never liked, the Mark Twainy kind. For some reason it connected with me, but the last thing I’d like to do is buy a pair of dungarees and go net fishing in a stagnant pond. But each to their own – Stipey obviously does it. The videos and the bit in ‘Man In The Moon’ where he does the little shuffle and the Elvis “hey baby” - when I saw that I thought, you twat, you’ve got it completely right, and here’s me hacking about with some half-baked solo songs. And they were half-baked, some of them from Mysterio. But after Automatic they did too much and a lot of it wasn’t up to that standard."