"Well, I grew up in the sixties. In 1962, I bought the first Rolling Stones single, and I still have it. I still have every single they released, in order, right up until Brian Jones was murdered. I saw Pink Floyd god knows how many times, and even did a couple of light shows for them... We started listening to pirate radio and John Peel’s Perfumed Garden, and had a friend at school called Spidey who was very good at spotting interesting new music. John Peel was the first person to play The Velvet Underground, and Spidey said, “Listen to this, you’re gonna love this!”. That’s when we got the first violin. We used to go to Birmingham, to this tiny little record shop that had nothing of interest except some Albert Ayler and free jazz. There was a record in there, and we recognised the artwork from Oz magazine so we knew it was by Hapshash and The Coloured Coat, because they used to do psychedelic posters and Oz. So we bought it just because of that. It was on Magnet Records. When we pulled out [the disc], we were shocked to see that it was on red vinyl, which we’d never seen before. We later discovered that all these people on the scene in London wanted to raise money for the legals fees of John “Hoppy” Hopkins, the first person who’d been busted for drugs and who co-founded the International Times. He was a real mover and shaker of the times. It’s like twenty to a hundred people high on acid jamming! We fell in love with it and still listen to it all the time. When we DJ, people come up to us and ask, “What was that with that great riff?” Guess what one of them ended up doing? Writing “We Are The Wombles”! That really got me in the head, that was worse than a bad acid trip!"

"It's one of the classic records of all time, but I remember when this came out I wasn't particularly a Stevie Wonder fan. He'd done the singles and he was a Tamla pop artist really, wearing a suit, and I thought I'd got him labelled. But then this record came out and it was like his coming of age almost. It's like a small journey, listening to this album. It has a very positive beginning and ending, from side one right through to the last track. And that whole thing of here I am in New York, that wonderful idea of bringing in sound effects of street sounds that gave a different atmosphere and set the scene for what you're about to hear. I think most bands wanted to do that kind of thing but it was very easy for it to take over, so it was mostly left to the Pink Floyds of this world. But for somebody to do it just on the one track worked really well. And he played drums on this album, too. That was the weird thing, because when you listen to the drums it doesn't sound like a drummer. The things he plays aren't instinctive, so there's a different kind of musicality to what he's doing, and where it goes and where he puts things and where he hits the toms and where he does crashes and stuff like that. In some ways it was very brave of him, because let's face it he could've got any drummer to do it. But it gives it what I suppose these days you'd call an artisan quality, but I think of it as an earthy feel. Otherwise everything would be too perfect on this record. You have to have imperfection to give it character and personality. I think there's something about imperfection that puts you more in touch with what you're listening to, because you're not alienated by something that's unachievable. This record has that by the sack full"

"Crass were maybe a bit too late for me or maybe John Peel didn't play it, because that was the only place I ever heard things, so I was aware of them and I remember seeing the records in the shops but never really listened to them. And then it was by chance that I heard this record, because Jeffrey Lewis is on Rough Trade and I was in the Rough Trade office, and it was being played downstairs. I went down and asked 'what's this?' We mentioned Bill Callahan earlier, and Jeffrey Lewis is another modern lyricist who's really great, but of course on this record none of the words are his, they are cover versions of songs by the group Crass. But with all the songs that are on here, I've never even heard the originals so I don't know what the relationship is like. My favourite is 'I Ain't Thick, It's Just A Trick', but unfortunately I didn't get to play in on the Sunday Service because it's got swearwords in it, but I have occasionally when I've been DJing if it's the right kind of place. It's great that song. There's something about the way he... I guess it's a little bit similar to what we were talking about with Stallion and the Pink Floyd thing, it's taking something and... I never would have thought of listening to Crass, I had an idea of what they were and what they were about, and thought they were crusties and squat punks and that wasn't what I wanted in my life, but the way he frames those lyrics in more accessible, slightly folky arrangements, really throws them into relief. In our current political predicament those words from 40 years ago really ring true again and you hear them in a different way - the art of the cover version is to bring the song alive in a different way."