"The Cure were just coolest band. They somehow completely hit the nail on the head, and they’re still relevant. They still manage to not put a bad taste in your mouth. They were never pandering to their fans too much. The greyness, the starkness, the boringness of Faith, the minimal-ness, the pathetic emptiness, the bleakness is perfect. They’re perfectly smudged images Robert Smith creates and you can’t make anything out. This record came before they were properly The Cure; at this point they were still a pop band. They were like a pop group; a three-piece that were seen as not really having an image. They were a bit too dapper, and not really punk enough. And then the next record and the record after that were bad. He was basically in the process of killing off his band. Those were very unpopular decisions he was making when he slowed it down and made it very minimal for the second record, which seemed pointless to the critical mass. It was seen as a mistake. And his hair wasn't even grown out at this point. This is a time in Robert Smith’s life before he had decided to come out as a parody of his former self. He was a serious guy but he decided to come out as a mockery. It’s all a caricature of the serious brooding twenty-year-old that was making bad decisions and sinking his band into the ground. After this came ‘The Lovecats’, and that was the worst thing he could possibly do. So my point is what you’re seeing is the evolution of a person. When you look back at that early stuff there is nothing funny about it, it’s completely sincere."

"We played with the line-up from this album at 2007's All Tomorrow's Parties. We were allowed to curate a day and we brought them over. That record A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die just got reissued on Superior Viaduct and they played a couple of shows in California. Danny Bland - a guy I knew from way back from the band Cat Butt, works very closely for Dave Alvin from Flesh Eaters [and The Blasters] - asked me if they came to Seattle, would we want to play with them and I was like: "Fuck yeah!" They were great man. They exceeded expectations I think and there were a lot of people at the show who were probably not familiar with the record but were familiar with the guys. They're like "we like The Blasters, we like X" but it's a totally different beast to those bands. It's got more of a Captain Beefheart, early Dr. John feel to it with the marimbas on the record, the Steve Berlin sax (another record with sax!). It was kind of an anomaly at the time. It was part of the punk scene but it wasn't a punk record. There was this thing at the time that I confused it with at first - bands like 45 Grave and Christian Death and the Dance With Me-era TSOL where everything was kind of getting satanic. I initially lumped it in with that stuff but it's so much better and further ahead of the game than that. The record for me was kind of a slow burn. I worked in a radio station and when it came in I put it on a cassette with a more normal hardcore band on the other side. I eventually found myself fast-forwarding through the hardcore side and just listening to A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die over and over again. It wasn't like initially "this is great!", it was more like "this is weird!" to a 19-year-old. Chris Desjardins' lyrics are awesome and dense and intense and pretty much like Nick Cave's. Both those guys - they don't write short, concise pop songs."

"If you're listening to prog like Gong then you're going to bump into Magma. They make their own language on their records, so we made our own words for Magma albums. A number of Magma albums would pop up in various friends' record collection, and each one was quite different. On Üdü Wüdü there's an 18-minute track called 'De Futura', which is like a suite and it moves to different tempos and it's got all these cross rhythms in it; it's an overwhelmingly transcendent record. There was a rock disco that we used to go to in Manchester in the 70s and you could take your own records and we used to take this record. You'd see these rock fans freaking out to it. It was a curious time in Manchester because you had the punk thing, but all these other oddball things like Magma and Earth, Wind And Fire were standing beside each other. It wasn't as tribal as it's been made it out to be. You'd go up to a free festival in Rochdale that was called the Deeply Vale festival and all these subcultures would be represented there, because all of the sub-cultures would be big enough to stand on their own two feet. But at this disco in Manchester, you'd hear Bowie and Roxy Music, and Magma, probably some Genesis and some Sex Pistols."