"My favourite song is 'Farewell, Farewell' which is this beautiful arrangement, awesome songwriting and then Sandy Denny's voice is just so haunting. But that album is masterfully arranged, masterfully recorded and I love the drum sounds. We were always trying to get the drum sounds to be more Fairport - it's so economical but really funky at the same time and they just have a lot of crazy meters that you don't even notice are shifting from 7/8 to 4/4 because it's carried by these strong folk song lyrics and melodies. But that was a big touchstone for us, especially some of the fiddle style parts. I think Richard Thompson is one of the coolest guitarists out there and there's a Richard & Linda Thompson album, I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, the title song of which is featured on this HBO show [Enlightened]. I thought. ""Is this a Liz Phair song from 1993, what is this?"" and then you discover it and think this song's fucking awesome. Her voice is definitely not as good as Sandy Denny's but it's probably more suited for that kind of 70s pop rock. But there's also this really great song on that album called 'The Calvary Cross', which could be a Lungfish song. He's just a dude who was way ahead of his time and more interesting than someone like Jimmy Page, who's been played to death and is such a rip-off artist!"

"I love weird people. The thing about voices is there's this idea, and this is my favourite thing about punk, is that I get really sad when people say they can't sing. That's not true. Anyone can be a singer. But when you hear Nina, she sounds like the exorcist. She uses all of her different voices. I don't even know another Nina Hagen record because that's the only one that ever really resonated with me. Playing that at Little Girls Rock camp [a foundation that funds and supports music education for young girls, of which Ditto is on the advisory board along with Tegan And Sarah and Kathleen Hanna], it blew their fucking minds. It blew their minds, and that is why I love Nina Hagen, and Yoko Ono, Diamanda Galas and Nina Simone because all of their voices are instruments. And her look! I met her and what did she say to me, "I didn't escape East Germany for nothing". Her story is phenomenal. It makes sense, because when you come from that kind of place you have to push the envelope because there's nothing to guide you. You have to make it up yourself and when you get to do that without pop culture references you get fucking Nina Hagen. It's so rare. I wonder what the next level of really untouched creativity will be? I wonder what that will look like? "

"I'd heard of Andy Warhol, but I'd never heard The Velvet Underground until David Bowie talked about them in interviews in the NME, and of course Transformer. I'd rather talk about Transformer than the banana album actually, because Transformer sums up the era. I do believe that Mick Ronson was very instrumental - like a classically trained musician as well as a gorgeous rock god lead guitarist. His arrangement abilities for both Ziggy Stardust and Transformer have not been fully recognised in the history of pop music. I don't think David would've broke through without that. I remember dancing to 'Vicious' in a nightclub called Masquerade in Liverpool - a really eccentric gay bar full of diesel dykes, prostitutes and older gay men with dyed black hair and toupees. It was a strange netherworld hidden up a back alley that embraced a bunch of freaks of my generation like Pete Burns and me, Jane Casey, who wore too much make-up. That was the thing about a gay club, you were safe almost in there. A strange refuge. I suppose in a way, punk kind of helped that. Absolutely. One minute you were queer on the street, the next minute you were a punk. It normalised that sort of behaviour really, you know; ""Oh, they're just punks"", and it was a diversion away from sexuality. Punk was strangely non-sexual. Even the main protagonist John Lydon had something of a 'neither here nor there' about him."

"I got a cassette from a cousin of mine that had The Offspring, Smash, on one side and Nirvana's Bleach on the other. That was definitely the wake-up call of rebellion and antagonism, but the first record I really got into from thereon was Surfer Rosa. It felt so alien but so familiar. It really clicked on a bone marrow level that felt like it had pre-existed for me. I bought Death To The Pixies at the same time on tape from HMV in Oxford and I just became obsessed with that record. I listened to it again recently and it reminded me particularly about how I could connect with Frank Black's lyrics despite not being aware of any real narrative when I was much younger. I don't think Foals would exist without the Pixies. I love the oddness and the strangeness of the Hispanic/punk/pop influence - it should be wrong, it shouldn't work but it does, really well. More recently I re-listened to his lyrics and appreciated how humorous they are, which reminded me that things don't need to be too obvious or narrative-based, they can be just fragments of thought. It opened the gateway into everything that then consumed me for the next ten years (Oxes, Albini, Sonic Youth, Godspeed - the American guitar alt/post-hardcore/post-rock world). Without Surfer Rosa I may have stayed with Nirvana and The Offspring…"