"Roy was about the same time. The Old Grey Whistle Test was on later than Top Of The Pops, and you had to be a bit older to stay up late and get away with it. I got my first sighting of Jobriath on there. I don't know if I saw a flash of Klaus Nomi on there too, and of course David doing 'Queen Bitch', Roxy doing 'Ladytron', and the New York Dolls was quite a moment for some people. It was via Genesis doing 'I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)' from Selling England By The Pound, that I became interested slightly in that longer haired world. I didn't go for Pink Floyd; I thought there was something not quite right about hippies, and you were either a hippie or not a hippie. Somehow, I heard the track 'Hallucinating Light' by Roy Harper, and was amazed by the quality of his voice. And of course, he had Chris Spedding playing guitar - David Gilmour plays guitar on the album also - but Chris had a sort of slightly Roxy Music edge to him as well. It is just a great album. 'The Game (Parts 1-5)' is a brilliant song sequence and it just appealed to me, as a perfect artistic statement. None of my other friends got into it, it was almost a guilty pleasure, but there was nothing to be guilty about because it was just a great record. The track where he has the colliery band - 'When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease' - is beautiful. It's hard not to shed a tear - it's a lovely song. He also had connections with Led Zeppelin, who I wasn't interested in at all, but a lot of people only know him because he sung on one of their tracks, but for me he was something outside of that."

"Well, what can I say? This is a hugely exciting record. Aphex Twin has got a huge reputation, obviously. When I was 16 it was one of the things which I had on MiniDisc, which we all had back in those days! I would just listen to it continuously. It was just around the time I was starting to make electronic music on my own, and I remember thinking, how can you make this? The technology I had and the software I had was absolutely shit, and I remember fiddling with it and thinking that I couldn't figure out how to make these drum beats so complex, and so delicately put together. Every five seconds or couple of bars something new happens. There's none of this copy and paste which all dance music at the time was doing, thinking in particular of that kind of Ibiza dirge that was shit and was on the radio 24/7. You just get 15 bars of the same thing, then one change, whereas Aphex Twin was the exact opposite of that. He would just keep your interest piqued the whole time, and that's one thing which I have always strived to do with the band, just to stop things being boring. Perhaps we push it too far, but I think all the 'inciness' and the whole thing about not letting it rest and be copied and pasted, I think is in my music as well. The other thing about that record is that it's not really a dance record at all, it's just music. I mean you can dance to it if you want, but there's lots of classical stuff on there really. There are lots of quiet moments, and lots of awkward stuff that is not really dance music."

" Oswald is probably best known for her last book, “Memorial,” an extraordinarily free reinterpretation of the Iliad. (At public readings of “Memorial,” she recites it from memory, in homage to the orality of the original. I was lucky enough to witness this in London. The effect is rhapsodic, spellbinding.) Oswald does indeed have a classical power: she’s at once a grand elegist and a close celebrant of life, a rhetorician and a playful contemporary—a writer who can describe Hector dying in battle but can also depict how he “used to nip home deafened by weapons / To stand in full armour by the doorway / Like a man rushing in leaving his motorbike running.” At the heart of her new book is a long poem titled “Tithonus,” after one of Eos’s lovers from Greek mythology. It is a minutely detailed, ravishing, and rapturously observant account of the English countryside waking up at dawn—what Oswald calls “46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn.” Slowly, the light builds and the stars disappear and the woods awaken to the birds: “as soon as dawn one star then / suddenly none then blue then pale / and the whole apparition only / ever known backwards already too / late now almost gone.” I’m sometimes reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edward Thomas, but the tutelary spirit seems to be Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves,” and that novel’s patient italicized passages (written from the point of view of the author) about sunlight building and spreading across the English landscape. (“The day waves yellow with all its crops” is one of my very favorite sentences from Woolf’s novel, and one that Oswald might easily have written herself.) This poet is, for me, a perpetual inspiration."