"Oklahoma City was a test city for MTV, and this compilation of US and UK punk rock bands – XTC, the Cramps, the Dead Kennedys – came out around the time, and had that same spirit. One song each, blam-blam-blam. You didn’t know who was American and who was English and it didn’t matter – what did was every band was doing it themselves and looking bizarre. And in a world where you knew you could never be the Beatles, here was John Cooper Clarke performing to 50 people and being fantastic. That felt huge. Seeing the energy coming off the audience when he made that effort really did something to me."

"We were in Paris and MTV was on. I remember I was really sick at the time, and Roddy Frame was singing Deep And Wide And Tall, and he’s just a really great pop songwriter. You can tell the metal guys that have successful, long-lasting careers are usually people that listen to music outside the obvious realm and have influences from outside metal. If we’re just repeating what our peers are doing, we’re not really pushing the envelope. I also own a Scritti Politti single called Wood Beez. It came with a turntable that somebody had left at a house that me and David Ellefson moved into, and I just kind of adopted it. It’s a little bit poppy for me"

"I like it because it's a time for me in the '90s, listening to that record. And he took four years off between that and Voodoo, and then years between that and the latest record [Black Messiah], which I think is amazing by the way. I'm such a lover of '90s R&B, and what I think was cool with the neo-soul thing of Lauryn Hill, him and Angie Stone. To hear the intro of 'Brown Sugar' on like MTV or something, and oh my god, just seriously cool. All this great music from that period. He's been a real influence on me actually. That whole time, in fact, but I think I'd choose him as the example from then."

"Eurythmics were another band that I was introduced to through MTV. I think that's how I got into synth-pop music. Annie Lennox has an amazing voice but also the instruments that they use, the way it was produced was so cool and different and tough. As a kid I loved 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)' because it was the big hit, but later in my life when I went back to the record I listened to 'Love Is A Stranger' as if I'd never heard it before. It's just so amazing that I couldn't believe I didn't remember it from when I was younger. Among the DFA family it's a universally loved song. We all try to emulate it, some aspect of it, in some way in different things that we do."

"It's such a cool song and it so represents that sound, the grunge of the 90s. I’ve just turned 37, so for me with the 90s’ I remember all the music that was out, I remember turning on MTV and seeing all the music videos and hearing all these songs. Rock videos were at their height at that point - at least in America - I know in the UK you had a little more pop than we did earlier on, but rock music was just everywhere. “This song reminds me of me coming out of adolescence and smoking cigarettes for the first time, trying rebellious teenage things like sneaking out of the house and going with my friends to the beach without our parents knowing; things that were kind of wrong. Now I look back, they were pretty harmless, but it was me kind of being a rebel for the first time as a teenager. “’Zombie’ reminds me of a couple of close friends. Actually, the girl that played it for me passed away about eight years later. It reminds me of her and that time."