"For me this is possibly the greatest rock album of all time. It's a band playing at the absolute, height of their power. It's very ambitious: it's got elements of ska and funk, pop songs, soul, jazz, rockabilly, reggae - and in the end it's got this really great blues energetic vibe. It just seems like they tossed it off and lyrically it touches on a lot of different subjects. Some of the songs are very political: 'Spanish Bombs' is about the Spanish civil war, 'London Calling' itself - that song is such an anthem. The band had some commercial success after this album - with Combat Rock - but to me London Calling is the pinnacle of their song-writing. It is just a fantastic record with an iconic sleeve; that shot of Paul Simonon smashing his bass, it's just incredible. I saw The Clash play in Chicago when I was on tour and it was like electricity. They came out and they started with 'London Calling'. The place was rammed with 5,000+ people and it went OFF! It was as if a bomb dropped and it was one of the most exciting concerts I've ever seen!"

"We played with the line-up from this album at 2007's All Tomorrow's Parties. We were allowed to curate a day and we brought them over. That record A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die just got reissued on Superior Viaduct and they played a couple of shows in California. Danny Bland - a guy I knew from way back from the band Cat Butt, works very closely for Dave Alvin from Flesh Eaters [and The Blasters] - asked me if they came to Seattle, would we want to play with them and I was like: "Fuck yeah!" They were great man. They exceeded expectations I think and there were a lot of people at the show who were probably not familiar with the record but were familiar with the guys. They're like "we like The Blasters, we like X" but it's a totally different beast to those bands. It's got more of a Captain Beefheart, early Dr. John feel to it with the marimbas on the record, the Steve Berlin sax (another record with sax!). It was kind of an anomaly at the time. It was part of the punk scene but it wasn't a punk record. There was this thing at the time that I confused it with at first - bands like 45 Grave and Christian Death and the Dance With Me-era TSOL where everything was kind of getting satanic. I initially lumped it in with that stuff but it's so much better and further ahead of the game than that. The record for me was kind of a slow burn. I worked in a radio station and when it came in I put it on a cassette with a more normal hardcore band on the other side. I eventually found myself fast-forwarding through the hardcore side and just listening to A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die over and over again. It wasn't like initially "this is great!", it was more like "this is weird!" to a 19-year-old. Chris Desjardins' lyrics are awesome and dense and intense and pretty much like Nick Cave's. Both those guys - they don't write short, concise pop songs."

"It really gave me inspiration when we were finishing Futurology - this was flying around in Cardiff before its release. Because there was quite a big Krautrock influence on 'Futurology' itself, it was just nice to be reminded of how other people were still ingesting those influences and making use of them. I'm not very good at researching people on the internet so I never know the background to many people's stories really, but this album Doppler is seamlessly out of the box. Just a great record. You hear it and you think, "This guy, one day, is gonna win an Oscar for best soundtrack or he's going to launch the best inspired pop synth duo of all time." There's just something there; there's a song called 'Dollygluten' and another song called 'Neigwl Vacuums' and another song called '23.4'. Just all classics. I love it when there's a sense of mystery about a record. I don't know what his MO is, I don't really know what the songs are about, there's no narrative from the vocal, but he's one of those people who's just popped out fully formed and said, "Hey, look what I'm doing!" I don't really know what he looks like - I don't know how to switch the computer on. But it's just one of those records that I absolutely love. And there's something endless about that Krautrock catalogue that allows people to reinvent the near future, which is great, I think."