"I chose this because it incorporated a period of my life where it was all about ska music and reggae and going out dancing and Studio One. I got this record from my brother, it would have been just played in our house and it was the sort of music that would come on and I'd be like "oh, I like that!" There was this club that we used to go to called The Black Angel in Norwich and it was far too old for me, and I snuck in there when I was 12. They used to play all this dance, reggae, Motown, but The Specials would sneak in there. I think my favourite song out of it is 'A Message To You, Rudy', 'Nightclub' and 'Does It Make It Alright?' It hasn't really influenced my music - as you can probably tell! - but it definitely encapsulated a time of my life."

"Greg Sage had a lot of great records right around this period but this one to me is the peak. It's extremely dark music and it's sort of hardcore but it's also undeniable pop songs. I remember driving around Austin with some of my hardcore friends from Temple and they were really into The Misfits, The Dead Kennedys. They weren't into my silly pop music, let me just put it that way. They were not Julian Cope fans. They put this record on they were like 'this is too gloomy. It's creeping me out.' It's a record that has classic song after classic song. At one point I covered 'No One Wants an Alien' just on my four track. I used to cover songs a lot just as an exercise because it was fun and to figure out how songs were put together. It was my process for figuring out how to become a recording artist. "

"People who didn’t live through that period or weren’t old enough to know what was going on somehow imagine that there was this fantastic post-punk thing going on. That’s all made up in hindsight. Really, everything was pop of the most plastic kind. And a lot of it was quite terrible. Though I did like Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” which came out in 1984. There was a real thing in the early-to-mid ’80s about modern classical music; there was a lot of that stuff around, and those were the more interesting things. If you know Tabula Rasa and know anything about the music that I’ve been involved with, you might struggle to find how I would connect with that kind of music. But it’s not really experimental music. It’s very emotional. It doesn’t have the form of a song but it’s not far from the world that Eno was exploring with his Ambient series."