"I first met Chris Bear when I was fifteen. We were both at a jazz programme and he was the one person there that was frighteningly talented, just ridiculously talented, I was very intimidated by him. “He introduced me to this and it was one of the first records the two of us bonded over. I didn’t see him again for a few years, but this record was something I kept with me throughout the last few years of high school and I always remembered this amazing drummer who introduced me to it. “That first meeting with Chris Bear has been influential in my music and my life. We were all trying to be cool kids, trading on stuff that we knew and he had this record. There’s a wildness and a subtle funkiness to it, it’s functioning within the bounds of what the genre is but it’s pushing these tiny gradations of feeling. That’s what makes really good jazz really great, it sucks you into these funny little changes in the way that people are playing. It’s so human you feel like you’re in it, like you’re the person making it happen, it’s very physical. “The playing on this is incredibly fiery, Elvin Jones is a classic player and I think Chris Bear’s drumming comes a little bit from his playing at times, but this record is a little bit outside of pure jazz. I feel in our band, and in Chris Bear’s playing, he’s always had that subtlety of feeling, you can play within any one genre, but there’s this lightness of touch and a really subtle dynamic going on. “It takes knowing the right thing to find what’s good in jazz, it’s got a language and a history and it’s easy to hear terrible shit too, I get that. I remember riding around L.A in the back of someone’s car getting really stoned and listening to the whole record was like seeing colours, it was really intense and overwhelming"

"This was probably the first Scott Walker song that I heard, other than Walker Brothers’ songs. “I was in a friend’s car in London around eight years ago and ‘It’s Raining Today’ came on. At the beginning I thought it was unnerving, this weird cluster of notes. At the end of it I turned to my friend and asked, “What was that? Is it modern?” When he explained it was a record from the ‘60s I was like “Are you kidding me?” The production and vocal sound is so clear and hi-fidelity. “I fell in love with the sound of it from a production point of view first of all. I’ve always been interested in the crooner vocal and all that sort of stuff, but once I got into the songwriting it blew my mind, because this is stuff that you can’t sit down and play on an acoustic guitar. “There’s this theory that you should be able to sit and play any good song on an acoustic guitar and ‘It’s Raining Today’ throws that theory out the window. You couldn’t do that song, and songs like it, justice on a guitar, because the orchestration and the chord changes are more psychedelic than any psychedelic record I know. I literally can’t work out any of the chord progressions, and I’m usually decent at sussing them out. I still don’t know what these extended chords are. Maybe if I was a piano player, I would. So, I find that very, very inspiring. “I absolutely love the string arrangement to the song too, it’s so harmonious, even though it’s totally inharmonic. I don’t know how to do that. It’s so brave to have that ominous thing going on underneath these beautiful cadences. There are moments where it’s just on the cusp, but because it’s an orchestra playing it they’re all moving together. If you did the same thing with electronic music or all of it separately, it would be very hard to get that movement and that swell and modulation."

"I heard this around second year at school, I must have been about 13. I bought it on vinyl and just caned it. The production on it is great. The Meteors were completely obsessed with 1950s music, doo-wop, rockabilly. And they were purists, you know. They despised people like the Stray Cats and the Polecats and the more charty bands of the time. Nigel Lewis, the bass player, I was quite influenced by his voice. In early Sleafords stuff I try and mimic it a little. It still sounds great. It's almost comical, lots of horror references. The Meteors invented psychobilly, there weren't any psychobilly bands around before them. It would be interesting to talk to Nigel Lewis, I tried to contact him but he never really got back to me. He left after the first album and they went to shit after that really. Well, now it sounds alright. But they got more thuggish, it wasn't very intelligent. There was a little bit of nerdiness about it at the beginning. Once Nigel Lewis left, P Paul Fenech got really arrogant and it married itself to the scooter scene at the time, which was predominantly white lads on scooters, pilot jackets, skinheads. It wasn't a very nice scene at all. There was a streak of racism, very misogynistic as well, just not very intelligent. Scooter rallies were quite hostile environments, you know. I went to one in Donnington in about 1984 and Desmond Dekker played and there were skinheads trying to get onstage and batter him with pieces of wood. It was just terrible. There was a little mod contingent but it was mostly this new breed of second generation mods who turned out to be scooter boys and psychobillies as well, the two things merged almost, it wasn't very nice. I was interested in the scooter thing and mod thing but I wasn't too taken with this, ""Oh fuck off, get your tits out!"" thing, and there was a lot of that. It just wasn't very inspiring."