"This is more of a current favourite and I first heard it when it came out. I'd left Supergrass and started writing for the first solo album and I got quite deep into that when I heard Shields, but really it was like the bridge between Here Come The Bombs and Matador. I just love the fact that I can hear the room on this record; I can hear the rawness of it, I can hear their love of sounds which is something that I'm a bit of a nerd about and those are some of the things just grabbed me straight away. It's so weird; sometimes a bass guitar sound can be enough to make me love or hate a band. It's quite shallow when you think about it, because it should be about the lyrics, and the package, and the melody, and everything about it but no, it's like: 'If that bass is shit then I don't like it!' I can get quite anal about those sorts of things, so Grizzly Bear are another one that I aesthetically gravitate to towards immediately, and then appreciate later the songwriting and the melodies, and Edward Droste's voice is similar to that of Midlake's Tim Smith. There's a similar quality in both of their voices that I really appreciate. And I like their playing with synths as well; they're not too overt or progressive rock-like. Yeah, this was definitely an inspiring album for me. I guess, if I'm being really honest, it made me think that I wanted to write a record like that. It's not screaming out hit singles all over it and I'm sure this wasn't an easy album for their record label to present to radio stations, but I really like that. When you've been in a band for 20 years [and] with each album, you get this extremely intense pressure to provide a three-minute pop single and I just wanted out. But writing those pop singles did come naturally and I don't think we'd have done as well as we'd done if I hadn't and I think I still do. Even on Matador I still can't help containing things in three or three-and-a-half minutes. It's like what Supergrass did on 'Strange Ones' or even 'Caught By The Fuzz'. There's a lot of information on those songs and it flies by. I guess that's just the natural way that I write. But then again, having listened to a lot of music on soundtracks over the years, the music on this album made me realise that I don't have to contain it all. It's like 'Detroit' on Matador; I really like the groove on that, so I just kept it going. It satisfies my curiosity like Neu!'s 'Hallogallo' does. I'm happy to sit there for that ten minutes. I think Supergrass came from quite a psychedelic background and that's stayed with me and what I'm into. This is where bands like Grizzly Bear come in, and I think that psychedelic thread runs through a lot of these records."

"I watched Serenity before Firefly [the TV series it was based on]. In 2000, binge-viewing wasn’t something that we did; we didn’t have access to that. If you missed a TV series, you just missed it. Or you’d record it on your VHS, right? It was a chore. In 2002 I was more of a country boy; I was always outside. But I like the whole idea of Serenity, the whole world, that outer rim world that we imagine that one day we will be [part of]. I actually felt this wasn’t too far out of our limits. You look at that ship, and it’s a junky old beat up ship. You would think after a thousand years, we will have things like that — that will fly and that will do things like that. We do. We have shuttles and they don’t look too far off [from those]. [That world is] only going to get closer into our grasp."

"People forget how revolutionary they were at the time. I remember seeing them in town when they were a 'goth' band. They weren’t really but they had that goth on guitar [Andy Couzens]. People think of them now about the way they look and everything but they were the last people in Manchester to start dressing like that. Everybody else in Manchester already looked like that. But really, when this album came out after all the trouble they had it was just perfect. When you got to hear the full version of 'I Am The Resurrection', it was just perfect. Ian had the image and he was a great frontman, Reni and Mani were like the tightest rhythm section ever. And John was a great guitarist yeah, but he was also in charge of this amazing sleeve art and this look that was really important to them and was different to anything else that was going on as well."

"Was this a comedy, straight drama, fantasy? I don’t know. It’s so incredible. This has one of my favorite endings to a movie, just incredible. When he walked on the water my jaw dropped, I just freaked out, freaked out, that we were making fun of him the whole time, we thought he was an idiot the whole time, thought he was like this mentally handicapped person, and all he was was simple. The things that were happening, and the people that were following him, and the potential future for him, makes sense when you just turn your perspective that way. Bold, bold, bold genre-breaking filmmaking, and will always be kind of a beacon of originality for me."

"Like I said, all this industrial stuff was part of what I was listening to before the age of 20. I was buying anything that I hadn't heard yet. I don't even know where i got the money to do this, but I did it. I would just buy it. If something, like this record, looked interesting to me, I’d just get it there and then. I had like three-hundred metal albums and once I remember trading them all in in one fell swoop. I traded 300 in and got 150 random records back, and this and Dome were in there."

"Then A Prophet. I love that movie. I think one of the greatest things about films is when they can take you to a very certain time and a very certain place. It’s time travel, its magic. I know nothing about what French prison would be like, I know nothing about it, but I believe every single second of that film. I feel like, after you watch that film, you know a little bit about what that’s like. I know how difficult that is to do. I just think it’s a beautiful honest moment, and I think that he deals with the immediacy of panic and how being panicked can change you and what people will do to survive. Its a brilliant film."

"It’s in my top five list of best films ever made. I just think it’s perfect. It’s an amazing portrait of an artist, an amazing portrait of a family, Crumb is an incredible central character. I feel like whenever I watch that movie — I sort of watch it every couple years — I start talking like him afterwards. I mean he really infects me in a way that totally changes the way that I look at the world. All great artists have that sort of ability. When I read some of my favorite novelists after I put down one of their books, I’m thinking in their words. I’m seeing the world through their eyes and it’s the same with Crumb. I’m a big fan of his comics, but that film does such an amazing job putting you kind of in his headspace. It also looks amazing, it’s shot on film, Zwigoff does an incredible job framing Crumb’s world, and the Jazz music. it’s just great, I just think it’s great. I think the movie’s a pleasure to watch. I mean, his brother Charles is f—ing incredible, man. Like, the idea that this family produced not one great artist, three great artists. And that Crumb was actually the one who was political enough and sophisticated enough and just barely enough of a people person that his art got seen. But, you know, Charles and Matt also were like really pushing the boundaries of the stuff and also hugely influential on Crumb’s stuff. You don’t get Robert without Charles. You just never sort of have access to those stories the way that this documentary has access to that family. It’s a lot to think about, the artwork that we end up getting as a culture, you know, often times is less about what’s better, and more about how savvy the artist is and how able they are to kind of be in the right place at the right time so that there’s an audience for the work."