"This is my favourite Smiths track, with ‘How Soon Is Now?’ a close second. Andy and I had a real shared history with The Smiths when we were growing up. We saw them at Maxwell Hall in Salford in 1986, which is remembered as being this legendary gig now, or so I’m told. The thing is, it really was that good - it’s in my top five gigs of all time. I saw them a lot of times, but there was something about that one, the energy was incredible. I think the place was oversold, so there was already a sort of danger in the air, and there was a sense that you were seeing a very special band at the peak of their powers, because it was just after The Queen Is Dead had come out. I can’t think of anything else that sounds like ‘The Headmaster Ritual’. The guitar tuning that Johnny Marr’s using is weird, so there’s this otherworldly feel to the way it sounds, but in terms of what Morrissey is singing about, that was very much rooted in reality; brutality in schools was still a thing during my upbringing and corporal punishment was still around, so this track in particular really resonated with me. I think any time you get one of the greatest lyricists of all time together with one of the greatest guitarists something special’s going to happen, but for me, ‘The Headmaster Ritual’ is probably the top example of what that band could do."

"When I got into that album I must have been 19 and in the same way with Andrew Hill’s Point Of Departure, it definitely changed something from the minute I put it on, more so than any of these records for me. It was around the same time as the Blue Note sale at FOPP, when I would buy loads of CDs and listen to them top to bottom a few times over. The album has the most beautiful dark quality to it and the fact it's called Nefertiti, was this all planned? Are you trying to reference this Kemetic Queen? And then even how do you even do that beyond the notes, because it's there when you listen to the mix and the atmosphere. We can't answer it, but he must have. This tune in particular, ‘Fall’, it's very cyclical, it's very repetitive. There's a riff that just keeps coming back and puts you in this really interesting, beautiful trance and it's so dark, but it's so beautiful. I guess on Dark Matter it’s that thing as well. Darkness to me isn’t bad, it’s another thing. Dark and light. My brother made me laugh the other day when he asked ‘If there's a speed of light, is there a speed of dark?’ and I was like ‘Oh My God’, but I just think our relationship with light and dark is very interesting. The minute you say something’s dark people think negatively and that's not what it's about. Dark is sick too, it’s beautiful. There’s so much intricacy, delicacy, beauty in that."