"I was an obsessive Echo & The Bunnymen fan, Crocodiles and Heaven Up Here especially, so when Themes For Grind came out... this might be a little creepy, but I was in a record store at the time, I was flat broke, and my girlfriend came from a really wealthy family, so I sort of talked her into buying it, knowing she pretty well wouldn't like it. I think she was a freshman at college at the time, and I remember being in her dorm room and listening to it over and over. I still maintain it's one of the most beautiful records. I don't know anyone else who has ever heard this record. I bumped into Will Sergeant at an art opening and introduced myself and told him how much I love Themes For Grind and he looked at me kind of confused, and said 'how have you even heard this, no-one has heard this record!' I have the vinyl of it somewhere but I couldn't find it online to buy so he very kindly sent me a Dropbox version of the album. My girlfriend eventually got into it. Even though it's very experimental, it's really beautiful. All the sounds on it are very odd and idosyncratic, but it's also got a really wonderful sense of atmosphere and melody. Boy, if I could be an evangelist for one record that people hadn't heard it'd be this one... but I don't even know how you'd get to hear it. Unless you email Will Sergeant."

"This is another one of those throw-the-gauntlet-down albums. We’d just recorded Underworld mk I’s second album and we were touring Australia and coming to the end of wanting to be a rocky, poppy, funky group. We’d heard acid house on the radio and we wanted to do it and being stuck in that group felt like a life sentence. Our manager sent us a tape of Talk Talk’s Spirit Of Eden and said, "this is what you call brave." And we knew Talk Talk because our mate Tim Pope did all their videos, but this was unlike anything they’d ever done before. We were driving through the outback and listening to it on the radio and the driver – who was a geezer from up north – kept saying, "this is bloody shit", and we said, "you either shut up or you get out and walk." We thought it was genius and it made us want to give up. It’s mostly deconstructed music. Tim had told us about all these strange recordings they were making and that they’d veered off course from what everyone expected them to do. It almost sounds like they made the record and then took great chunks of music off it. It’s beautiful. It’s all about the sound of the instruments. It’s like a cleaner version of the Burial album; they could almost be the same thing. Spirit Of Eden travels with me everywhere. After we’ve had a particularly loud and banging concert I’ll get in my bunk and I’ll put this on. It’s the antithesis of Underworld."

"Around 1983 or '84, pop music stopped doing it for me. It was getting a bit clean. There was still a lot of good stuff, but I think it was The Smiths... I wasn't obsessed with them the way Sice was and a few other people I knew, but listening to them made you want to find something else. Then, when The Jesus And Mary Chain came out that was it. My brother brought their second single home and I wasn't sure at first. It was such a racket. It still is. But it was 'You Trip Me Up' that really did it for me - I was sold. This beautiful marriage of... it's not nice feedback, controlled feedback like you'd get off The Who. It's awful. But the core of what's going on - the song - is so lovely. And they looked fantastic, like The Beatles in Hamburg. They looked like a gang. It just seemed like they were blowing everything away and starting again. I went to listen to the Velvets after I'd heard this, and the Velvets did it... it was either noise or it was a great melody. They never really did the two together, whereas the Mary Chain managed to marry the two. The video is just fantastic. They're walking around somewhere in the Mediterranean, sitting on the beach in full leather gear with their massive guitars. After hearing the Mary Chain, that was all I wanted to listen to - bands who did that. They were a big band. They were in Smash Hits, which is hard to believe."