"That’s real easy. I’d have to say Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, with the dudes shaking hands and the guy is lit on fire. Storm Thorgersen is an amazing artist, so much so that we used a guy named Hugh Syme, who was a protégé of his, for Countdown To Extinction and Youthanasia. We wanted something original and thought provoking and not just an illustration. We got pigeonholed and everyone was like ‘Where’s Vic?’ every time. With Youthanasia, people’s asses were growing together because they thought we actually hung babies upside down and took pictures. What we did was have the moms come in and the babies were on these clear tables with the light underneath, then the moms would grab their toes and pull their legs straight so it looked like they were hanging by their feet. I thought that was brilliant."

"Neu! has to represent Cluster, Conny Plank, Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Brian Eno. It's an extraordinary piece of work. I was introduced to it when I first went to art college. There was a guy called Tony Fowler who was the polytechnic DJ and he was a little bit older that everybody else. I wheedled my way in and became the sorcerer's apprentice or whatever, thinking I could get my taste on there instead. He played me this and at the time I was very confused by it. I thought I was quite... I listened to Captain Beefheart and Pink Floyd and good stuff, but this was really challenging, the minimalism I guess. I can honestly say it didn't make me go, 'Aha! This is ze future!', but many years later, after I'd had it in the car stereo, I remember Klara saying, 'Papa, you've been playing 'Hallogallo' for two years, can we hear something else?' I was going: 'But it fits! It fits! It's perfect every time!'"

"When I first heard Ariel Pink, I was very homesick for LA and was kind of depressed and miserable in the Midwest, which I love, I should add. It had nothing to with the Midwest: it was just the circumstances. This record was one of many things that reminded me that I needed to come back home to LA. There was something about the sound, the love for moving around, both physically and within the music, the sense that you could go wherever you wanted to go in terms of melodies and harmonies. I totally related to the freedom, the crazy characters that are in the songs. I had started recording and I found myself really interested in his passion for building characters in songs. I love his music to this day because he does that so well. Again, it was important for me at a particular time and it continues to be."

"This is a project from Ben Wallers and Alastair Mackinven from Country Teasers. We moved in similar circles in the mid-90s. I saw them do the whole of this at the Moth Club earlier this year. You could think 'oh what a funny idea to cover the whole of Pink Floyd's The Wall', but they actually did it really well. I used to be a Pink Floyd fan, and one of the first albums I bought was Dark Side Of The Moon, but The Wall is where I parted company with them, I thought it was just a self-indulgent mess. So I was amazed to go and see that they'd actually made it palatable, they'd done something interesting with it. I know it's not coming from a take the piss point of view, Ben's got an actual affection for that record, and they'd really thought it out. The Wall is one of the most indulgent, over-produced records ever done, and so the idea of two guys on a stage at the Moth Club doing it is like 'how the fuck are you going to do that? Where's the choir, where's all this?' But it worked, it was really good. I preferred their version of The Wall to the Floyd one. I remember going to see the film version of The Wall, and Bob Geldof played the main character, and it was so rubbish and painful, the worst kind of that rock star moaning about nothing in particular. There's something in that record to do with a performer's relationship with an audience that's interesting - there is something strange about getting up on a stage and performing in front of people. In Ben's live performances as The Country Teasers or The Rebel, sometimes people think he's trying to wind the audience up or whatever, but it's always important that the audience is there and you're never allowed to be a passive spectator. I don't know if that's why he finds [this album] an interesting thing to deal with, but you could tell that there's a reason for it, it wasn't just 'let's try and do something ridiculous'. "