"I learned about this record from the Luaka Bop reissue in 2001, so I subconsciously include 'Strawberry Letter 23' on there, which isn't on the original record but is one of my all-time favourite songs. It's the same for lots of the classic soul records, but this album in particular has that sense of one person in a studio in this playground - this wonderland - and it's so euphoric and happy and positive, in that mode of somebody just exploring music and exploring sound. That's something that really connected with me, because that was very much my perspective of the music I was making at that time. It's like, "Oh wow, look at what you can do with this sound, with this technique or this piece of music or whatever.""

"My son Ben went to Elliot School, which is quite famous for producing musicians. The first one that I knew was Kieran Hebden, who makes music as Four Tet. There was a culture at one point that was encouraging people. Ben was in the same class as the xx’s Romy [Madley-Croft] and he knew Jamie [Smith] quite well, and I knew his parents. We even went to their holiday house in Norfolk. The xx were the shy ones, they were like a little gang. Jamie was the most outgoing one, and he was pretty shy. I knew quite a lot about how that record happened, that they tried first with a producer and then did it in a house studio. We were living just down the road from where that was going on."

"I saw it again recently and had to watch it all the way through to the end. It is so emblematic of an era of film that was unique to its time. There will be no more Bogart and there will be no more Bogart films, and it was for me like the quintessential Bogart film. He’s a good guy with a shadowy past, –he’s a little gruff but you absolutely cheer for him no matter what. It’s just good old fashioned filmmaking that I don’t think has aged, except for the fact that it’s so stylized and sort of melodramatic that you could never pull it off again. It’s frozen in time. It can’t be altered, so it can’t be hurt. Nobody will ever successfully make that film again."

"When I was at school, Raymond Pettibon was one of my favourite artists. I'm not into comic books and I don't really like comic book artwork for records and some people probably would describe Raymond Pettibon in that style. And yet despite that, he just has something else. He has ideas. That particular picture on the cover of Goo was an image I was familiar with before I even knew who Sonic Youth were, which is probably a bit unusual. I came across it in one of his books. As a sixteen-year-old there were so many of his images, especially when those images included text, that really sparked off my thoughts. I found them really evocative. Sonic Youth are obviously a brilliant band but I only came to learn that a lot later."

"I remember when I was in high school someone signed my yearbook - this guy Guy Blakeslee who's now in the band The Entrance - amazing guitarist and he told me how to play the A minor chord. He signed my yearbook, "Hey hey, my my, rock and roll will never die", and I remember thinking, oh my god this guy's a genius, and then I found out it was the genius Neil Young. A genius steal. He probably thought I should have known it, but anyway I think I got the album after I found that out and it became one of those albums that feel like they're your own secret album. My mum listened to Harvest a lot so I knew the 'Heart Of Gold' era, which I also love. Rust Never Sleeps became my personal Neil Young treasure. It has such a raw sound, I guess because it was recorded live. I didn't even know there were overdubs on it. Actually a lot of the albums I chose were those live albums that are what is live, what isn't live?. But on one song on the musical we were stuck on the opening and I went back to Rust Never Sleeps and pretty much ripped off the song 'Thrasher' - the opening to that song. That was 'Fathers And Brothers' - it's just a stupid little simple [thing], we were just going for something really simple and I remember we worked on it all night, trying to get this arpeggiated thing working and we just went for the straight strum in the end, and the engineer/mixer guy came back and said, "Thank god you you went for the simple thing". 'Powderfinger', 'Pocahontas', they're all great. Young is somehow able to pull off these songs all about the plight of American man that would just seem so cheesy nowadays, but I think there was this experimentation with subject matter in 70s songwriting that was kind of innocent and is not really done today. I enjoy the storytelling of Neil Young, the simplicity of it all, and just that voice [that] can sing just about anything and make it sound good."