"Bowie was so important when we were growing up in terms of the way he chose different directions and that that was an acceptable thing to be doing. You'd just be getting into one thing and then he'd turn into the Thin White Duke or something and he'd invite you to twist your head around that. And when Low came out it was like, ""Whoah!"" because it was a complete head twister in terms of how the record sounded, and how Bowie removed himself from the music because there's hardly any upfront Bowie on it. I've always liked instrumental stuff – things like The Shadows and The Tornados' 'Telstar' and those kinds of things – and it's reflected in the music of 808 State, which draws from that kind of thing where melody is the central thing. But the instrumentals on Low almost sound like backing tracks and that's quite confusing. And it was beatless, and that took you to another place. Plus, it was also the record when I first fell in love. There's that theory of your first love record, where it soundtracks your summer and Low is that record. That kind of music and that hormonal rush creates a kind of nostalgia that's deeper than other records. The fact that Brian Eno is on it, when I first started making music, gave me a bit of elbow-room. With the musicians around now, there's a lot of technique, but technique isn't the key to everything. This idea of being a non-musician and using noise as your instrument defined me quite early on; the School of Eno was in me! Even though it was recorded in 1976 and released in 1977, in some ways this is the first post-punk record. This certainly coalesces with PiL's first album, and it they both gave rise to the notion that not everything proggy should be thrown out with the bathwater."

"I had this back in the days when The Monkees were a TV show and they were everybody's favourite. Every Saturday you'd rush home to watch them. Bear in mind that television then was three channels, and so pop music in any sense was really limited. There was Ready Steady Go on a Friday, Top Of The Pops had started, but you didn't get a lot. You didn't get a lot of kids with guitars, especially with long hair and flared trousers that were glamorously American. But the real thing came when the tunes that they had were so good. Every week you watched the show and every week there'd be a great song at the end. You had to have one of their records, and this was the album that I had. There are so many varying styles of songs on this record. You'd go from syrupy ballads to something a lot tougher, but most of the character in the work was really about the melodies and the tunes, many of which were written by Neil Diamond and people like that. It was weird that there was that whole stable of people sat in an office from 9-5, writing tunes. But they understood how it worked and how to do it, whereas with The Damned, for example, we didn't really get arrangements or dynamics when we tried to write until later on. But when you heard that variation in, if you like, quality music- and it was quality music, The Monkees, even though saying that would've got you hung back in the 70s- it made it okay to be diverse. So when The Damned moved on and we started getting to Machine Gun Etiquette and Strawberries and those kinds of records it was fair game to do something that wasn't a raucous three chord punk song, because we'd grown up with all of these bands that I'm talking about, and actually they all seemed to show an element of that. So it rubbed off."

"It was a real wake-up call. Hip hop until 1984, 85 was fun but for the most part it was party music. Living outside New York we'd listen to WBLS and Kiss FM where they played a lot of hip hop and me and my friends liked it, but it was very lighthearted. The Fatboys are the perfect example, or the Treacherous Three, where they have disco basslines and this fun vocal. Then almost out of nowhere Public Enemy happened. Everything about it was different. The lyrics were different, Chuck D's vocal approach was different, the subject matter and the production, the Bomb Squad. I remember hearing it for the first time and thinking how did they do this, because they've basically made punk rock hip hop, the sounds they were using, the way they were distorting basslines, it was a lot of the same ways industrial records were being made but they were making hip hop. It was so revolutionary. You can refer to musical culture in New York as before and after Public Enemy, it changed the city. New York was so dangerous then, it had the highest murder count, people were getting stabbed and shot and the crack epidemic was decimating communities and people were dying of AIDS. You'd go out to nightclubs in the late 80s and you'd hear these apocalyptic Public Enemy songs that perfectly described the city that you lived in, but they were oddly celebratory and you could dance to them. For better or worse one of the reasons I've left New York is because the city I grew up with is still there, but it's become a much meaner, safer version of its former self. I still love New York, but it's become primarily the domain of hedge fund managers and wealthy tourists, so I don't know how many more Suicides and Silver Apples and Public Enemys and Eric B & Rakims are going to come out New York City."