"So he started off as an indie guy. 'Loser' was just a song he released on an indie label, but it caught fire. MTV picked it, blah blah blah. And it was later put on a proper album on Geffen. He is an eclectic artist and a Scientologist to boot. The irony is that Beck's father [David Campbell] actually arranged the symphony orchestra that backed us up at the Melbourne stadium when we played there. Mellow Gold has got this eclectic sense to it in terms of, like, he uses drum loops, which I hate, but it sounds cool to me! He uses different kinds of instruments and seems to play them all, and the songwriting is all over the place. But at the core of it, what he doesn't do that other singers do is show off. He just gets the personality going and sings the song. So when you think of Brian Johnson and Robert Plant and Paul Rodgers, they're showing off with their vocals, singing way up on the high end of their range. I don't care if it's Steven Tyler or anybody else, you show off! Beck doesn't show off. He's just midrange or low-down. His attitude comes not from what he does vocally but it's laid back, kind of matter-of-fact, as if he's just thinking to himself. It's a unique thing. In that way, even though it doesn't have a wall of guitars or any of that, it's very rock. That sensibility he's got, although I'm sure he would consider himself an indie artist, but his sensibility is very rock."

"When I was growing up, hip-hop was pretty new. My oldest brother was really into it. Also, we had MTV from about 1990 onwards, so you'd see all these different people - A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy and Gang Starr - just became a soundtrack to whatever we were doing. I picked that one because I love DJ Premier's production, but also Guru's voice. I'm a big fan of the experimentation within hip-hop. Nowadays, people feel hip-hop has gone mainstream or whatever, but at that time, people were making records that were sampling very out there, experimental music, but combining them with parts from classical or jazz recordings, resulting in this very dense collage of sounds that is at times not even very melodic, but it's always got an amazing groove to it. It was those aspects in combination with Guru's voice, I just found it really inventive and exciting. Also, I would listen to it, and want to know where the samples had come from, and then I would go on missions to try and track things down. I think there was a Monk Higgins sample used on the track, 'Code Of The Streets', and that's just very alien-sounding. It's very basic, but it uses this beautiful violin part all the way through the track. They must have just been listening to such a wide variety of music, and what they've come out with is much more interesting that what came out post that era of hip-hop. You get some songs where there's a whole song taken, with just new lyrics added on. Back then though, there would have been as many as forty songs sampled in one song sometimes."