"I was only about 13 when I heard it and it was another one that I played a lot in my bedroom. There was a trilogy of females, which was Joni Mitchell's Blue, Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love and Bjork's Debut that I discovered when I was 12 and obviously had a huge impact on me. But Joni Mitchell, for me, her voice is like an instrument, the same as Bjork's - I just loved hearing a woman's voice that sounded so free and was doing weird things to my brain, pulling it around. How do you even talk about something like this? You just end up saying a load of cliches! There's songs like 'River' and 'Blue' and I didn't know anything really as a 13-year-old about California and Laurel Canyon and the psychedelic 60s and what had happened to everybody, the disenchantment they maybe felt later on. I didn't really understand the background of that, yet there was this woman coming out of my speaker, her feminine energy and her freedom, her expression, her unapologetic rawness, again, and the beauty and competence, and weird tunings, it all completely made sense to me. It all sounded like this amazing place that smelt like pine trees and had golden, yellow sunshine and long hair and tapestries and curtains and cats and guitars. I thought: "What is this place that this woman is talking about?" Actually it's just this universe inside of her, she's like this amazing building full of beautiful things, so complex and so deep and intellectual. I just think she's fully competent on so many levels! I was listening to Carole King, Tapestry, at the time, and that's another beautiful record, but Joni Mitchell's is just emotionally more complex. It was meandering and had movements and parts to it and her voice would soar. There's that bit where she's saying, "hell's the hippest way to go, I don't think so but I'm going to take a look around it": there's that onset of disenchantment, where she's sick of this bullshit, and Joni Mitchell's so good at seeing through the bullshit - it's not this throwaway, idealistic, hippy kind of thing, she's always burrowing a little bit under the surface. As a young girl, hearing women talk about travelling, going on an aeroplane, missing California, being in Paris, seeing some guy playing guitar and writing a love note on a napkin to her. It's like good life experience, listening to that through someone else."

"I probably first encountered this when Neil Tennant sang [sings]: "I feel like taking all my clothes off / Dancing to The Rite Of Spring / When I wouldn't normally do this kind of thing" and I thought "ah, well if Neil Tennant wants to take all his clothes off and dance to The Rite Of Spring, I ought to as well". He's one of my idols also - I couldn't put any of the albums in, because they're not as good as the hit singles, but I do love the Pet Shop Boys. I do love Stravinsky as well, and The Rite Of Spring, if you were going to sum up the history of humans and music, this might be the thing that you end up showing off as the absolute zenith of achievement. I remember on the Walt Disney film Fantasia, they had a bit of this and they animated it with dinosaurs and volcanos, and although it was a bit silly, I kind of knew what they were driving at: this music sounded like it existed before humans and after humans! It's like the earth itself is kind of grumbling! He wrote it for a ballet about tribal rites, pre-history, people being human sacrifices, but it says even more than that to me - it's almost nightmarish, although it's got so much virility and astonishing, complex rhythms going on and some great, great tunes. And you can never beat the opening - it's actually a bassoon played up really, really high, going [hums melody] - it's like the eeriest thing I've ever heard!"