"This is another case of, "Where's my Radiohead gone?" Hearing Muse for the first time was like, "Holy shit, this is like Radiohead, but heavier, and more pop, but also darker as well", and I just absolutely fell for it, hook, line and sinker. I was at the perfect age, was just getting into actually being good at playing stuff, and Matt Bellamy was all over the place in terms of his musical talents, playing the piano and guitar, and stuff that teenagers love. Stuff that sounds flashy and complex and twiddly but is actually not. And the bass player! Fuck me, the basslines on the album! Bass players don't do that kind of stuff! He's the sort of main character in an awful lot of those songs. It was an absolute revelation. I was a bass player before I was anything else, and I remember thinking, "Holy shit that sounded ace"! They ripped up the rulebook in so many ways for rock music. It was so enjoyable as well. Every song had a real sense of performance and razzmatazz. Of course it's called Showbiz and it is a type of show. So I think, more than anything, that's probably what you would say about my band, particularly live - we're not subtle, it's over the top. Whether people like it or not, that's got into us now and it's hard to take a step back."

"Moving to New York from Ohio in 1976, it was an opportunity for me to just basically gorge myself on films that I had never had an opportunity to see before. There were so many theaters, so many repertory theaters showing films. You could see three films for a dollar, you could see prints of these movies, and I was watching a lot of films. In 1977, Saturday Night Fever came out, and it was the first time I remember seeing a film twice. Sitting there and watching it once and sitting there and watching it again. Another musical choice, but different than A Hard Day’s Night because it felt like it really captured what was going on — at least what I felt was going on in New York at that particular time. Travolta’s performance in that film is one of the top ten performances I think I’ve seen in film in my entire life: very real portrayal of a character, the relationships all feel very authentic and real, and it’s got an energy and an emotional intensity that really stuck with me. Sticks with me all these years later. I always wanted to see someone do a sequel to it — not the sequel that exists, not Staying Alive, but the sequel that felt like — it would be interesting if someone would go back to do a Creed sort of version of where those characters are now."

"Robert Ashley is famous for having made these so-called operas, a lot of them were for TV. He works with the voice in these really great ways. I love this record because you don't know exactly what's going on: there's a lot of mystery. You have to piece together what's going on within the minutiae of the musical environment. Or you don't and you just listen and enjoy it. The sounds are very beautiful. Ther's a distant organ in the background just playing this one chord and you can also hear a bass. You can hear this woman whispering in French but you can barely hear her. Then this male singer appears but there's some crazy modulation on his voice. So all these crazy elements combine to create this crazy environment that you want to listen to for maybe ten minutes, because it's not like a song but it's got the elements of a song: you've got a bassline, you've got these instruments playing harmonies and you have voices. But you can't tell what's going on. It has an atmosphere. The album is called Automatic Writing but the track I'm talking about here, specifically, is called 'Automatic Writing'. It's important for me because it reinforced this idea that you could put beauty into music without necessarily using sweet melodies or whatever. I do have that in my music, but I also like the drama that can come from just… voices."