"Violent Femmes was a huge high-school record. I probably got it when I was 14 or 15. I just played the entire album on stage with [Femmes bassist] Brian Ritchie, Brian from the Dresden Dolls and [Bad Seed] Mick Harvey, so I found myself revisiting the record and my early experiences of it. The one thing I remembered was that when I heard that record for the first time, I thought Gordon Gano was a girl. But really sexy! The songs were so sexy and raw and filled with beautiful, actually relatable teenage angst. The music and the production was all so immediate. My cool friends and my older brother were all listening to punk. I tried to be cool and tried to like the Sex Pistols, but I just couldn't get into the records. There just wasn't enough song there for me. But the Violent Femmes was like punk music that my brain could actually follow. I played that tape into the ground, just a non-stop soundtrack. Another thing I realised revisiting it was there's just not a bad song on that record, not a single moment that isn't essential. There's not two seconds of filler."

"Sometimes I nose around on the internet, seeing what people are talking about. I'll download a track from iTunes just to check things out. 'Wanderlust' is one of the things I listened to. I think it's just fantastic. I love the way it's just got that one drumbeat, I think it's a drum machine, I'm not sure, and that's all it does. [Hayden Thorpe] has got a fantastic voice. It's got these sort of crappy-sounding keyboards, organs. Some of that album [Present Tense], I've been listening to it over the last few months, sometimes it's so overly pretty it puts you off a bit. They're obviously in love with 80s synth sounds, a lot of people are these days, and sometimes the arrangements on some of the songs just feel very 80s and slightly too ornate and slightly too pretty. But on 'Wanderlust' I think they completely nailed it and it's really just one part. It doesn't go through lots of different sections, the way the vocals and the music develop. It's a great song, very poppy, very pretty, driving and it makes its point."

"I heard a really early demo of theirs that someone sent me once and it mentioned me, a really early demo of theirs. I could never work out what position he was taking on me. He goes [adopts Jason Williamson drawl] ‘Baxter Dury!’ and quotes one of my songs, but then he just disses everybody. I said ‘who the fuck is this guy?! I don’t wanna be dissed!’ And then when someone told me he was a fan, I was like ‘thank fuck’, and I listened to the album that broke them. I was living in the country and I was jogging a lot, I remember thinking it was fucking brilliant. I wrote songs like ‘Miami’ and stuff off the back of listening to that album a lot. We became mates and it became a nice two-way appreciation thing. I used some of Jason’s energy, started being a bit less apologetic, so he was an inspiration. We send little caring texts to each other every now and then. He’s a lovely bloke, I really like him loads. He’s really sensitive. I love that they’re now becoming the darlings of that world. They deserve to be."

"I first heard this one in 2000, or maybe 2001. My girlfriend at the time, Eleanor, had a Bo Diddley compilation that I think she got from her brother. I was grown by then so it wasn’t like I was listening to Bo in the crib, you know? But I came around to it. ""For a long time, I wasn’t a fan of the blues, because my limited understanding of it was cover bands on Sixth Street here in Austin - that version of the genre was just white guys trying to imitate Stevie Ray Vaughan. I think Bo transcended blues though. There’s so much more going on; there’s pop elements, there’s pure rock and roll elements. ""What I love about him the most is that he’s all about the maracas. That’s something that I’ve snagged, for sure, they’re the coolest percussion instrument. He went on The Ed Sullivan Show with a four-piece band, and one of them was just there to play maracas - that’s how essential it was to the sound. On this song, Jerome himself is the maraca player and he’s singing the response vocal - singing his own name. I love that."