"Whenever I listen to this I find myself quite overwhelmed by it. There was an interest in the '70s in that Bulgarian folk singing, the kind of singing where they sing in 2nds. One of the harmonies they use a lot is a 2nd, which is a very unusual interval, and I remember that being around and there being a great album called Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares, which is an amazing record, so I think I was aware that that part of the world had interesting music. I don't really remember how I got this one other than I bought it in France. The softness of the male voices is like softly blown flutes. If you grow up in England with the disgusting operatic tradition we have, where the men's voices have to be so manly, it makes you violently ill [laughs]. Hearing the softness of this was so touching to me. There's one section in one of these tracks that is too amazing, where the voices that are all woven together gradually separate out so that all the voices above a certain register keep on going higher and higher and the ones below keep going lower. It ends with this incredible chasm between the voices that is just startling."

"I never knew if this was a compilation album or not, but it was the one that was around when I was at school. All of my mates had this record. 'Sunshine Of Your Love' and 'Crossroads' are my two favourite cuts off the album, but the thing was although as a band they were gifted with tons of ability they were also very musical with their recordings. One of the things they got, which I don't think a lot of the other bands did, was that it's great to jam for an hour live, but a record is a repeated instant. When you make an album it's something that people listen to over and over. So I think there were two Creams. There was the one that recorded and did songs that were four minutes long like 'Badge' and things, and then in something like 'Crossroads' they kind of just kept the best bits. I think they got it right. It's very difficult to be inspired and to be inspirational to your other players without it having to be a long-winded routine to get there. And alongside all that was that track 'A Mother Was Washing Her Baby one Night' which was brilliant ['Mother's Lament' from Disraeli Gears]. When I heard that it made it okay to have a sense of humour sometimes and to not take yourself too seriously. For me that last three minutes on the album probably had more of a message than a lot of the rest of it did, because it resonated that yeah, you can do something that's fun. You can do something that's funny, because actually we're pretty good at the rest of it already."

"They'd made three albums before this that had the hits on and some other stuff that was really good, but I never really liked a whole album. There were great moments. But then Caravanserai came out and I liked the way the songs move and flow and change direction and bring in different moods and atmospheres. It was a very exotic record for me, living in Kingston in Surrey. It felt like I was hearing the real sound of the desert. The musicianship is so great. One of the things I love about Santana is that they always had great drummers. Obviously you've got Carlos on guitar, but every instrument is pushed to the front. When the Hammond player is letting rip you can really hear it. It's a very well-structured record, which back then was a very different thing to do, because it was all about the live performance, and if the song was eight minutes long you'd play for eight minutes. There wasn't the technology for any sophisticated editing so people used to play it that way to create that mood and that atmosphere. To capture that in the studio is difficult, but on this record it kind of goes beyond that. It's like somebody said there are no rules for how you do this. I don't know how to do this so I'm going to do this by instinct, I suppose. Also, for them to come in with Latin music that wasn't salsa or mariachi was unheard of. They were saying 'this is what young Mexicans do'. I just remember watching them at Woodstock and seeing [Santana drummer] Mike Shrieve and thinking my god, how do you do that? How do you play with all of them at the same time and they're all playing different things and it all works out so remarkably well?"

"I've read since that Hex Enduction Hour was going to be the last Fall album and that Mark was going to split the band up if it didn't work. The rest of us weren't aware of this. I guess it could have been like David Bowie splitting up the Spiders From Mars onstage at the Hammersmith Odeon, but obviously this proved not to be the case. I put this in here because it was the last Fall album that I did, and everything that we'd learned just came together. I was on Live At The Witch Trials, but that was a pop album. It sounds like a totally different group… well, it did have different musicians on it, I guess. Mark obviously wasn't clear on what he wanted The Fall to sound like at that point in time; Dragnet was just the sound of a load of kids who couldn't play being thrown in a studio and being excited and being in their favourite band but… [laughs] well, Dragnet is a mystery to me, that album… I remember recording it and the production… it never sounded the same twice. I realised that wasn't how we sounded live. It didn't sound like The Fall. It sounded amazing in its own way but it didn't sound like The Fall. It didn't capture what we were doing. But with Hex Enduction Hour, everything came together at that one point. We did some of it live in a cinema in Hitchin and some of it in a studio in Iceland that had lava walls. Apparently it's still talked about to this day, The Fall's stay in Iceland. No one went to Iceland then, The Stranglers had played there, Jaz Coleman ran off there to find the ley lines, but that was it. I think we first went there because we were invited by Einar from the Sugarcubes. He instigated it. It was so bleak there. There was no tourism. And the mentality of the Icelandic people was like that of The Fall, to be honest. It was a real case of us versus them. They were out on a limb. Iceland didn't integrate. It was a really strange community of people. They were really nice but otherworldly. That was my swansong really. I mean I'm on that Room To Live album as well, but I listen to Hex and I hear a glorious racket. I think that's when Mark really got to grips with what he wanted The Fall to sound like, and ironically you find out later that it was going to be the last Fall album. Mark's stream of consciousness really comes together, the way he makes words up like in the title, he really got a handle on where he wanted to take his own art. And with the band it was all because we'd been playing together for a long time. Steve Hanley couldn't play bass when we were together in [pre-Fall group] The Sirens, I taught him the root notes and I couldn't play guitar either… I still can't, if I'm honest. Steve found his feet and found his sound, so he became the engine room of The Fall. The sound of it is right, despite being recorded in these two totally different environments. I remember when I heard 'Hip Priest' on Silence Of The Lambs, because I was the only person left in the cinema when it came on… I tell a lie, it was just me and the wife. Jonathan Demme was a massive Fall fan. Yeah, it was peculiar that… but then again it's the music that a serial killer's playing in his house, so is it really that weird? Mark's given me grief over the years, but how can you take any of it to heart? Anything he says is water off a duck's back. He's a character… almost a cartoon character. I've got a massive soft spot for Mark and I'm a massive fan. Round the corner from here there used to be a venue called The Arches Bar and a mate of mine was having his birthday party in there in the mid-80s. I was upstairs, and my mate said Mark Smith's downstairs and he wants a pint with you. So I thought, right, well, we've both grown up since then, let's have a drink and put it all behind us. So I had a couple of pints with him, and we had a really good time together. I'd been listening to The Fall, he said – and he'll deny this – I've got your album and I'm keeping an eye on what you're doing and I think it's great. I mean we were both drunk, but by the end of it we were kind of mates again. Then about three months later they reissued a load of Fall albums on Cog Sinister, so I rang him up and said, 'Am I going to get paid for any of this?' And he said, 'No you're not!' [makes noise of phone being slammed down] So it was straight back to square one."