"I sometimes worry that I don't like current music. I remember when I was thinking about today's interview that I was so glad this is a current album. Well, actually it's four or five years old. When I first heard this album it blew my mind – it has hit after hit. There is a conviction he has when he does things that could possibly be deemed as being cheesy or not cool and this conviction overshadows all of that and it is wholly satisfying. I knew of him before, but it was a wonderful surprise to hear this music. You hear a song like 'Round And Round' and it is epic – it's like a mini-musical with all the different parts – and everything is so intricate, be it the percussion or the different vocal parts. I think it is a masterpiece. It was really wonderful discovering him and finding that he had a trail of all these really bizarre records that he had been doing for years. You could buy all these weird albums - he was beatboxing on some of them - and I loved generally finding out all of his history. He would tour and not turn up at gigs, or just lie on the ground and shout ""I'm too ill to do this!"" and leave, or he would just turn up with a bag of mixtapes and put them in a tape machine and sing karaoke. I think there are a lot of faux eccentrics knocking around, so it is nice to find someone who is genuinely eccentric. It's satisfying to know it comes from a real place. I was lucky enough to see him play in a church in Koreatown [in Los Angeles] about eight months ago. There is always a worry when you really love a record that a gig might not be as good. He came on stage wearing leopard-print trousers and a floral shirt and carrying a basket of flowers and told us he was Little Miss Riding Hood – it was just wholly entertaining. He is a real treasure."

"Kraftwerk were a major influence on me musically and stylistically. They were really the first truly electronic band I'd heard. Afterwards, of course, I listened to all the other German things like NEU! and Can. I'd listen to The Human League and whatever came out of England in that time period. But, Kraftwerk were right at the centre of it. The first album I heard in its entirety was Trans-Europe Express, which I almost picked for this because I do love that album. But, I think Kraftwerk’s absolute masterpiece is The Man-Machine - be it visually, song-wise, arrangements or sounds. It is as close to a perfect record as I feel has been made in that genre. There is nothing that touches it. When I used to DJ at the Rum Runner club - I was 16 or 17 and starting out - I used to play a lot of tracks from The Man-Machine because almost everything on that album you can play. Funnily enough, I'd never seen Kraftwerk until recently when they played the Tate Modern. I went to three shows - The Man-Machine, Trans-Europe Express and Computer World - because I felt as they had had such an impact on me I should go and see a whole load of the shows. They weren't a letdown, the 3D effect was extraordinary and it was such a joy to hear those songs loud through a system like that. You don't tend to get to hear synthesisers that loud unless you go to a club and listen to some horrible remix. Kraftwerk had great taste and a lot of music is about taste. They didn't make so many albums over a period of time but everything has been impeccable - every sound, every delay, every vocoder. They really paid attention to detail and that's something I have a complete obsession with. I can fiddle with something for ages and ages that I feel changes the whole track and nobody else will hear what I'm doing. Kraftwerk had a great ability for that. They made really impeccable records."

"Grasshopper gave me Lady in Satin for my 30th birthday. People were startled by the quality of Billie’s voice on this, her final album before she died, you can hear the years of her life in her voice. As a singer you’re always doing everything you can to imagine your voice being clear, non-crackly and not having any cobwebs, you’re doing everything you can to sing perfectly. “Yet here was someone singing imperfectly, but with all the vulnerability of a life well and certainly intensely lived. That changed everything for me, hearing the crackle in her voice, the years making their way out of her windpipe, almost by clawing their way out. “I’d read that Ray Ellis, who conducted and produced the album, cried when she first sang these songs, because he knew her as someone whose voice had a very full, rich-sounding tonal quality. Yet on this album you can hear the cobwebs, the lisping gasps of air between words. He cried because he thought this shouldn’t be Billie Holiday on record. It was only later that he thought it was her masterpiece. “It was the first time I began to see the connection between the singer, their voice and the listener, that it had nothing to do with the pureness of tone, being perfectly in tune or singing as loud as could be. It was all about the emotions that came out via the breath and the notes together that made the connection. “It changed everything, not only about my singing, but the way I began to understand what people appreciated in a singers’ voice. I could really understand and take some of the pressure off trying to be what I thought was a perfect singer, I know I’m not, but you always have it in mind that you’ve to belt it out and sing perfectly. “I finally began to accept that what comes out of me is my voice and no one else’s, this song and the album as a whole finally released that anxiety in me. The next record we made was Deserter’s Songs.”"