"I came to Beefheart late. As a youngster, a lot of the older lads were into Beefheart but I didn’t like the way they dressed or their attitude I didn’t think they were cool. They were borderline radical hippies and I wasn’t having any of that. It didn’t look like fun to me. So I steered cleared of Beefheart. And then years later, somebody sat me down and played me Trout Mask Replica and I went, "oh my GOD!" and went out and bought everything. It was his use of language – he was writing like an abstract impressionist painter, fusing together chunks of English language that made more sense to me than something written straight. He was writing emotions through raw chunks of images that were coming to him. He was the first lyricist that made complete sense to me. Then I read that this music that I’d thought was badly played was in fact played amazingly well. He would write these very emotional piano pieces and then hand them to the guitarist who was the MD (musical director) and say, score that for the whole band to play. Often they weren’t even played to a rhythm – they were kinda random – and the band had to play along with them. They’re astonishing renditions of something that is so abstract that it needs great musicians to play them. He was fusing the blues and finding new ways of playing it. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) is one of his later albums where he returned to the style which people loved – trying to be less commercial than his Virgin Records years. There’s a track called ‘Tropical Hot Dog Night’, (quotes lyrics) “like two flamingos in a fruit fight… Everything’s wrong, at the same time it’s right… Like steppin’ out of a triangle into striped light” – and this reminded me of my drinking years. That’s exactly what it was like, where you’re in shadow and you’re in white light. This man knows exactly what’s going on in my head. He wrote such beautiful poetry. In later life, I made contact with him through Anton Corbijn and he’d send me music of his that wasn’t quite so well known. But I never got to meet him sadly. As a painter he was a massive influence on me because his titles were so fantastic. I take that same approach when I’m titling paintings for exhibition."

"I've been listening a lot to that record lately. My desire to be a musician started with my love with his band. My first exposure to him was probably Caribou, because my friends had it. My dad got me Elton John's Greatest Hits, then I think I discovered Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Madman Across the Water, Captain Fantastic... And later on, I started to dig back, that's when I really got into Tumbleweed Connection. It's got a real kind of Americana into it. I think, it’s my impression, that Elton has a kind of a love affair with America. Maybe some kind of country music elements in that, as well as pop and rock & roll. And it just has a southern feel to me. ‘Country Comfort’ and ‘Amoreena’ are two of my favourite songs in that record, they're just so fucking well done. I'd met Elton a handful of times and he's always been a very knowledgeable guy, very interested in the band. He's asking you about certain tracks, and this and that like he's actually listening to our stuff, the kind of shit an assistant's not telling him before he walks in. I kind of learned this around the time he ended up recording for our song [‘Black Gives Way To Blue’]. He's a big fan of Alice In Chains. He keeps up on what comes out in all sorts of music as a fan himself, very fucking knowledgeable. You know, to ask a guy who's your number one musical inspiration to play in one of your songs... that means the world to you. We never expected him to say yes, but you don't know unless you ask. So I wrote him a little e-mail, explaining the significance of that song, especially through what we were moving out of, that we wanted to honour Layne, that we wrote that song as a making peace and saying ""goodbye my best friend"", and moving on with the band, to live a new chapter of the same book. That itself was huge, and then for Elton to listen to that song, and get that, like: ""I wanna be a part of that, I think it's a beautiful song. The emotion is very genuine, and I want to play piano on it."" Pretty mind-bungling stuff. One of the coolest things that has ever happened to me and to the band."

"I’m going to take us from otherworldly right back into the world itself, to my teenage years. I guess you could say this about nearly all of these songs, but this one in particular got me for the same reason that The Catcher in the Rye gets people, the idea of ‘us versus them’, the real, sincere people pitted against the phonies of the world. “As a teenager I could have written The Catcher in the Rye, nearly any teenager could. At some point you feel yourself isolated against this outside world and The Chameleons were a band, lyrically and musically, that kept ringing this same set of isolated chimes of the individual pitted against this hostile world. Heading into my teenage years I was like everyone, looking for someone that can say something better than you can until you can say it better than they can, and for a while The Chameleons could say it better in song than I could speak it myself. “With ‘Second Skin’ they had the lexicon and the guitars that I loved. It was a sort of musical version of The Catcher in the Rye, of someone trying to make sense of a very perplexing, and at times hostile world that I think all teenagers find themselves in and I was no exception. For some people it was punk rock and for others it was other elements of entertainment, but for me it had a lot to do with music and in The Chameleons I found a direct way of saying it and not in the blunt, abject anger that punk rock sometimes wielded. I didn’t feel it like that, mine was much more of a pointed knife than a blunt nightstick. “It’s even something that people say to us, that they grew up listening to Mercury Rev or Deserter’s Songs. When you’re writing, it’s coming out of you but sometimes you forget that for people who are listening to it when they’re thirteen or fourteen, it’s their lexicon, it’s a newly learned vocabulary. That’s where sometimes as an artist you forget the importance of what you do, because music is what carried you to the point of doing it later in life. “Everyone has one song or a band that seem to take the words out of your young, teenage mouth before you could form them and for The Chameleons were one of those bands."

"I can remember being introduced to this album at a very specific moment. I went round to my friend's house, and I think my sister had the CD and put it on, and I heard the introduction to 'Lithium' and those drums and I just thought: ""What the hell is this?"" It was the most exciting thing I'd ever heard. It was like that for a lot of people of course, I was no different. But it was very shortly after we heard that that my friend got a drum kit and my brother got a guitar, and my brother had a bass, and I knew that all I had to do was pick up that bass and we had a band. Nirvana were a three-piece and there were three of us. You didn't have to play very well, and you could play the same thing quietly and then play it loudly and that was kind of a revelation for a little kid. That was all Nirvana ever did and created the most amazing feelings with it. It was a very powerful thing to put into the hands of a little teenager. It's really easy to get together. You just all need to play the same thing on these three instruments and it will work, and you will sound like a band and that's so empowering. In terms of my musical style, Cobain has a really good way with melody and he doesn't really sing very obvious things. He always comes down on the major or minor third of a chord, and it really colours the music both positively and negatively in a way that not a lot of melodies do. The aggression in it and the fact that it can be tender in one moment and then the opposite the next is something which happens in my music. The emotional intensity of Nirvana is something which I definitely think my band is probably guilty of, in terms of high emotional stuff happening. They are really interesting, just in terms of the fact that there's so much depth in it, despite it being very simple, and the lyrics don't actually mean anything, and yet you can get so affected by Nirvana in such a strange way - not necessarily just because of Kurt's story, but because there is something in the music and it's very difficult to describe."