"I could have chosen the first record Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! or, to a lesser extent, Freedom Of Choice, but I like the rawness of Duty Now For The Future. I think the Eno production on the first one was great but this is just a little bit different. To me, they were very cynical but also really funny. They obviously created this whole myth for themselves. Devo had this whole package before bands really came up with that. They had this whole mythology built around them. Other people had that - I guess Magma had this whole mythology built around them so they're maybe not the first - but at the time it felt really futuristic and it felt like a whole new thing was happening."

"It's a beautiful record. It's the Neu/Can supergroup in a way with Jaki from Can on drums and Michael on guitar. It's the pop end of Krautrock and sounds like Utopian sports montage music or something! It evokes the future, even still, for me or my idea of what the future would be at that time. It's a record I listened to a lot in recent years and just a record that I really recommend. I wouldn't have heard any of this stuff until the early-1990s but it was something we listened to a lot of as the Super Furry Animals. I quite like listening to instrumental music as it means I can still think over it without lyrics interfering; there's a time and a place for lyrics!
"

"Every man I’ve ever gotten close to has loved this movie to the point where I am less interested in a guy’s astrological sign than the degree of his obsession with Days of Heaven. So I was a little resistant to the whole Malick canon. Which is nonsense because this is the greatest film of a great director. It’s so stunning and genuinely suspenseful, which is a rare combination. It’s a classic but not in the way that some classics can feel like taking your medicine. Like Do the Right Thing, no one needs me to be the one to introduce them to Days of Heaven. So maybe I’ll just describe the order of images that pop into our collective heads when we think of this film: Wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat, Sam Shepard, wheat, wheat . . ."

"He had to get in there. He's definitely my all-time favourite singer, vocalist, simply because there's something about the arrangement of his vocal cords that really strikes an instant... I just recognised it from the moment I heard it and I felt, "this is like my surrogate brother or something!" The moment that I heard it, I could sort of sing a bit like him, I'd developed those vibrato tones and I enjoyed doing it so I just felt an instant kinship. Add to that he wrote some great songs, but more than that he was like the foremost interpreter of Jaques Brel in English. I'd not heard of Jaques Brel before I'd heard Scott Walker's songs - after I listened to Scott, I listened to Brel, and enjoyed that hugely also, but in a very different way. Scott and also the Walker brothers, they did make a particularly awesome noise back in the sixties, which many other people tried to do but didn't do as well. The first record that I heard by Scott was the wonderful best of that came out in the early nineties, The Best Of Scott Walker And The Walker Brothers I think. It's pretty much the only collection you need if you want to hear what they did. But Scott Walker Sings Jaques Brel is fantastic - it's only ten songs I think. He only did ten songs, so that seems reasonable, but 'Jackie' is hilarious and wonderful. I stopped sending all my albums to Scott Walker after I read, I think it was in Les Inrockuptibles as well, they managed to get an interview with him, which nobody could at the time and he said "yeah, this wee Irishman keeps sending me his records - I don't know why". And it was simply because I loved him so much I wanted to give my things unto him [laughs]! You know, "I've made this for you Scott!" I suppose I've got a bit older and I don't feel the need anymore. As well as that, I understand where he's coming from these days much better. I enjoy his modern records, his insane modern records, but it's quite obvious that he doesn't care about the old sixties output, so the fact that some guy is really terribly enamoured of them, I'm sure he doesn't give a shit [laughs]! He can buy them in the shops like anybody else!"