"The Ramones are quite a cartoon-friendly band and I thought they'd have more illustrated sleeves. Pleasant Dreams is always the album of theirs that gets overlooked even though it's got some great really poppy, bubblegum songs on it in the style for which they're known for. And it kind of looks like a Saul Bass cover. When I was a kid it was my favourite Ramones record, with songs like 'You Sound Like You're Sick'. Just brilliant. How many times can you say "this record's good" as a reason for liking it? I guess I've found there are two types of people: people who find a record, really love it, and don't want anyone else to hear it. Then there are other people that find a record, love it and are almost baffled as to why more people haven't heard it and make it their mission to spread it around. And I guess I'm the second type. Pleasant Dreams is one that I was sort of confused as to why it wasn't mentioned more."

"Everything just fell in place. The right people, the right director, the right script, the right timing, what the world was going through. Everything just fell right. So Godfather, Slumdog Millionaire, Laurel & Hardy, and Chaplin. Well, it’s too early to talk about Slumdog, but I’m sure after 50 or 100 years people are going to say that everything just fell in the right [place] for Slumdog. The Godfather is not [just] an American hit, it’s really a worldwide film. Anywhere [you go]: China, Japan, Mexico. Everywhere students of cinema, ordinary people, everybody just loved the film. It’s got that cinematic magic, The Godfather. And, you know, it’s the lighting, the camerawork, the editing, the performances, the casting, the colors, the costumes. It was cinema at its best, and I’m sure it is something which, as you say, was written. Just everything fell in place. It doesn’t happen with everybody, it’s [when] people are [from] a certain kind of work culture [that] these things happen normally. What I like about The Godfather [is that] it’s very classical. [Coppola] just leaves the camera. You never see the camera moving. It’s very static and it’s the actors [who are moving]. [But] still you create the magic. You don’t have to juggle the camera to attract attention. The music also is very subtle. Everything is subtle. Your mind is throbbing, your [hairs are] rising, you’re on the edge of your seat, but still everything is so calm and relaxed. It’s cinema at its best. Slumdog? That’s also cinema at its best but everything [is] movement. There’s so much movement, there’s so much energy, the script is moving, the screenplay, the camera is moving, the actors are moving, everything is moving. But still, you understand the story. It is in control. Still, it moves you."

"Gino Vannelli's albums were what made me feel it was possible to be a songwriter. When I was younger I used to do a lot of production work with my cousin Brian Warfield, we had our own studio. He went on later on to produce artists like Jhené Aiko and Miguel, but before that I feel like I was very much his very first hep artist, his homeboy at least, just making music together. We'd go buy records to sample and then we would work on music and go eat Yoshinoya. I remember my older brother came over, and he picked up Gino Vannelli's album on a fluke. I'd never seen it, I'd never paid attention to it, it was just sitting in the pile of records. My older brother put the first song on to find the sample and the way the record starts out grabbed my attention because of the style progressions that are happening immediately. When he left I put the record on and it washed over me and transformed me. There's songs that when you actually put them on you lose control of yourself almost, and you go into this thing where you start to sing, and all of a sudden you are a singer because this is something that you love so much. And when I would hear Gino Vannelli, I would pay attention to the lyrics, I'd pay attention to what he was singing about; some love loss or some mythology or something weird that a woman that has done to him. This is one of my favourite albums, Gist of the Gemini. Along with Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald, he kind of shaped my songwriting and kind of let me know what it was to write songs. I was always told that you have to be honest in the music, but I was like 'well how do you do that?', and the people that taught me how to do that were Gino Vannelli, Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins, with a couple of other people too."

"A friend of mine played me the Wu Tang album way before it came out. I was so entrenched and deep into this music shit by then that a lot of music was shared through people I knew and I would subsequently hear a lot of projects in their demo phase. I also got a lot of stuff from attending the underground mix shows: this was one such record. The Friday night mix shows were so special back in the day, especially in breaking new music – and what a record this was to break. It took me multiple listens to realise this was so radically different from anything I'd ever heard previously. Soon enough, I was like 'Yo, this shit is amazing.' Hearing nine different MCs with totally different styles meant that it took a little time for the Wu Tang to settle in: I admit I didn't get it the first time I heard it, but once the record came out and I started hearing it more and more, I knew this was something very special indeed. I had my favourite MCs in the group like everyone did, but as I started to get to know them more and more, I realised this was a group where at least six or seven of the nine MCs could just go off and be platinum selling artists in their own right. How many groups or collectives can you say that of? It wasn't even like a supergroup or something put together specially – these guys just came from the same sort of space as us and they were doing this incredible shit. RZA's production was phenomenal and I admired it so much, especially the concept of the slang, the Kung Fu…it was ridiculous. All the other philosophies behind it too were so special. For me, there was always something for everybody in that band because you have nine entirely different personalities in there and you're going to find something to like out of those nine motherfuckers [laughs]. Everybody had their favourites, me included. The first time I heard it, RZA and GZA were my favourites then as time went on, I liked Raekwon and Ghostface Killah. I saw them a couple of times live, like very early on before they really blew. Their gigs were just pure raw energy and the stage was chaotic and hectic because there's nine people on there with mics doing their own thing. They didn't have the most organised shows but there was this energy that they brought – this wild, fucking crazy ball of energy that they always delivered on the stage. You never really did know what was going to happen next and that was always exciting Ol Dirty Bastard was also one of the most unique characters ever in music. I always look for uniqueness and authenticity in an artist and he just had it in abundance for me. I heard him and thought, 'He's one of a one'. His music had a message of like, 'don't get stuck, free yourself'. It was a powerful message. I don't know if they can ever do something like this again or if something this special will ever exist once more: they had so much powerful energy. It's something very hard to hold together when everyone is going in a bunch of different directions, continually shifting. Yet they did it in that space and in that time: I doubt you can repeat that."

"‘Telstar’ is such a unique sounding song. On Joe Meeks’ original version of it he starts off singing in tune, but that all changes. I don’t know whether it was Geoff Goddard or someone else in the studio who translated that into “Oh, that’s the melody that you were singing”, because he’s so in between the notes, you can’t tell if it’s a G or a G sharp or an F sharp or whatever. “In terms of sound design, you can’t find a song that sounds like ‘Telstar’ - it’s completely unique. The main thing for me is there’s no lyrics in it and to create such an atmosphere in essentially what is a pop song is just brilliant. I wish I could have heard it for the first time in the ‘60s when it came out, because it sounds so ahead of its time. Even though it’s quite lo-fidelity there’s really amazing stuff in terms of production techniques that I steal all the time - like speeding up pianos to make them sound like harps or speeding up whole tracks to make them sound not like real-life or superimposed. ""During the recording of the new album it definitely inspired me as a producer, because when there’s a missing sound you can use a Joe Meek-esque mad idea, or make some conventional sound unconventional. It’s also inspiring in terms of the whole home recording thing. We still make our albums at my house. I've changed from being in my parent's house in a little box room to living in this old chapel-type building and now living in a house in the countryside. I've got a dedicated out-house to music, but it doesn't feel like a studio - it still feels like home recording and obviously Joe Meek had his own studio. Maybe he was inspired by Les Paul and Mary Ford, they always did stuff in hotel rooms, so perhaps he was inspired by that. “For the way that I work, when you feel inspired it’s incredibly important not to be limited by having to see if a studio is free. Also, you can’t underestimate the importance of having a space for the gear that you have set up, just so nothing holds you back when inspiration strikes. ""For a lot of the tracks on the new album, I’d been sitting out in the storm porch, having a cigarette and then something would come. It sounds so cheesy saying that, but it does happen. At the time you don’t really know how important it is, you sometimes think, “Should I record this?” or commit the idea or the melody to a phone recording or whatever. You don’t know whether it’s going to be any good but when we get a full song out of it, it’s like “Wow, if I hadn’t recorded that, would I have remembered it?” “With sound design and production, I do the very opposite, which is strange. When I'm getting sounds together - maybe to create a song - I’ll spend maybe three hours just recording some drums and some parts, I don’t even have a song and then at the end of it, if I’ve got nothing out of it, I just delete the project, because if there isn’t a song in there, it doesn’t matter how good the drums sound. I’d rather have the song and build the sounds around it."

"Changes' was a strange one, because it always felt a little bit jazzy, a touch of cabaret, so it was tough to find how to play it. For me as a drummer I went for less-is-more. It meets the minimum beat, I had to play it in a way that doesn't force the listener to have to pay attention to the beat or think about the stops. It just needed backing up, that's all it needed. I even tried putting little drum rolls on it here and there, but then listened and thought: 'Nah! It doesn't work!' It sounded like being flashy for the sake of it. Just showing off. That stops the flow of the song. So, I decided to just keep it simple. That one got a hell of a lot of plays on the radio but it didn't actually sell. It was a big disappointment, because we thought it would. It wasn't until years later that It took off. 'Changes' seemed to sum him up, because basically at that time the attitude was that we will do what we have to do to make it, whatever changes we would have to adapt to, whatever things we have to do to get attention onto the band, we would do it! So, it was kind of an anthem for the band. A statement."