"Erykah! I love her! From Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald and Bille Holliday I learnt about jazz music. And the sound was quite strange to my ears. It's different to Malian music. It took a long time for me to accept the sound. But Baduizm was something else. Music is about frequency and these frequencies - the way she sings, the arrangement, the groove - I'd never heard this before in my life. This album totally changed my life. I realised that music is infinite. Because I come from Mali, we're not used to listening to many types of music. We listen to African music, from Senegal, Benin, Guinea. But most of the time we only listen to Malian music. You grow up with a Malian sonority. So Erykah Badu for me was a new world. It was a trip. I had to adapt to accept it and once I accepted it, I went deep inside it. It had a strong influence on my music, the way I write now. There's no limit. I don't compose just music from Mali. I like to be open, to experiment."

"Nina Simone is special to me because of her voice, the fact that she sings very low. When I listened to her voice for the first time, I asked my husband, 'who is this man?' and he said 'no, it's a woman!'. I told him: 'no, it's impossible, she's got a voice like a man!'. That was my first impression of her voice and of her music. I like to sing very low when I'm in the studio so I felt very comfortable listening to Nina Simone, because this is the way that I wanted to write my music and sing. Also, the fact that she wrote a lot of protest songs. 'Feeling Good'- you can interpret it as you want. When I listened to this song for the first time, it was my introduction to Western music. I was in Paris, and listening to this song was like freedom to me. Freedom, because when I left my family [in Mali], I ran away."

"This is a record that I found from trawling the racks. It was the cover that intrigued me – a guy playing electric guitar in desert robes in a tent. I had to find out more. Tinariwen were a band that had an extended tribe, so people would come in and take over the vocals. They had different players. Later I learnt that the leader would take his guitar and go off into the desert and write the album under the stars. Years later I met up with them and discussed me and Brian Eno going out and spending time with their tribe, the Tuareg, and recording with them in the hills of Mali. We talked about it and started to plan it out, and then Underworld went on tour and that was that. Brian and I still talk about it. I listen to a lot of African music, that fantastic polyrhythmic, joyous tumbling sound which, for me, was techno. They did it so beautifully and made it sound haunting. They are a phenomenal group. This album was their first – it was recorded by a French group who had heard about their music and just went out to the desert and found them. It’s crudely beautiful."