"It's a funny one, this record, because I think of it almost as an instrumental record. I don't listen to the lyrics, I don't know what they are. I listen to Mark Hollis's voice and it sounds like a trumpet. Words as sounds. I don't know what any of the songs are called. I listen to this almost like I listen to Music For Airports, it's a mood piece. It's interesting where it came in their career path: they started off as this pop band and then ended up as a very obscure avant-garde group with Laughing Stock. Spirit Of Eden was the interesting bridge between the two. Slow Attack, the album I did with lots of woodwind, was massively inspired by Spirit Of Eden and the sense of drama in it. It's very mellow in places but again never easy listening. It's pagan folk. Folk music isn't about men in silly jumpers with fingers in their ears and all that clichéd nonsense. There's something really earthy and pagan and Wicker Man-ish about it."

"The rumour goes that when the guys from the record company [wanted to] hear Spirit Of Eden, knowing the commercial success of The Colour Of Spring, Talk Talk wouldn't let them hear a note until the album was finished. They took a long time. The story goes that the label guy went to the studio, they lit some candles and put on that record and he cried and left. To this day they don't know whether he was moved or thought it was terrible. But from a personal point of view, they started out by their own admission as a Duran Duran copy band. I was tempted to put a solo record [by Mark Hollis] on the list as well. But I thought that was labouring the point."

"This is from Laughing Stock, I wanted to choose something from this, Sprit of Eden or Mark Hollis’s solo record, which I love. Chris Taylor loves those records and when we were doing Shields I got really obsessed with them. I didn’t hear Talk Talk until after we made Veckatimest, maybe it was because ‘80s reference points weren’t fashionable when I was growing up. There’s something in the silence and space in this music that feels like it’s not made by a person, it feels like the record made itself. I guess that was their process, players would come in and do whatever they wanted them to do and then they took a piece of it and arranged things around it. I’ve always wished I could have been in the room when these records were made, just to see what kind of conversations were happening, if it was actually just a brutal process that they really didn’t enjoy to go through making them. There’s certain chord progressions on Laughing Stock and Spirit of Eden where you feel you just couldn’t write them, they sound like they emerged from nature, grew out of themselves and are eating themselves at the same time. With ‘Myrrhman’ especially there’s this weird turning chord progression that starts in the middle of the song, it never releases and it doesn’t let go, it’s moving around itself and imploding, with that quality of using space and silence as an instrument. “It feels like something that no one person could play, it’s like a mystery. The more you make music you try to channel whatever that mystery is, where you don’t know where something came from or how it happened, it’s something that’s totally human but comes from nowhere and you don’t know why and these records do that so well. The more we do this the more I realise that whilst making music and listening to music isn’t the same thing, it’s not really that different. Learning to be good at making music involves wanting to hear what’s going on as if you’re a passive listener, rather than ‘I want to do this and I want you to like it.’ It’s not about trying to make someone like what you’re doing, it’s channelling whatever that Gestalt thinking is that allows these things to happen. This was a real touchstone going into Shields, not so much for Painted Ruins, but it’s still something I always want to get back to, because it’s a trance-like state that feels like it came from no one, it just came out of the ether."