"This is from that same period. He's such an unusual artist. I could have chosen the first album but I'll choose Shooting At The Moon because I saw him play when I was in Coventry and it was just absolutely extraordinary. It was the group that had Herbie Flowers, David Bedford, Mike Oldfield... This was another John Peel thing. I heard 'Joy Of A Toy', 'The Lady Rachel', 'Stop This Train' with Robert Wyatt playing drums, and all that early Soft Machine stuff which he liked. It's beautiful, things like 'May I?', incredibly gentle, beautiful love songs. Sexy. That gentle and sexy thing has always been there in Wire. When you think of 'Blessed State', which is Bruce's song, absolutely beautiful. There's always that temptation to make it simple; Colin with his white hat and us with our black hats, that's the tension. It's not as if we haven't been accused of being obscure on occasion, or opaque. But usually it's the things that people think are opaque are the things that are straight reportage. People do it, you see it, you write it. Real life is stranger than fiction but it seems as if in popular song it's not - it makes real life really dull and not about love, negotiation, and mess, and passion."

"Those performances. Timothy Hutton’s performance in that is probably the most directly inspiring to me, and that’s a young guy at the top of his game, emotionally raw, and brings everything that a young actor could want in a performance. I feel that that film is the most heart-wrenching and true portrait of a family maybe I’ve ever seen. To describe it well would reveal too much. That’s what’s brilliant about it. Everyone should watch it and watch Mary Tyler Moore with Timothy Hutton and Judd Hirsch. I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe that movie. It seems like such a simple concept, and yet Robert Redford kills it. The scene that always gets me, hits me so hard, is a small scene that not many people would say they love. Most say the big breakdown scene with Judd Hirsh. For me, it’s the scene where Timothy Hutton has been going to Judd Hirsch for a little bit, and he’s opening up. It’s such a journey of what it means to be vulnerable and the importance of vulnerability in your own family, especially after trauma. My character in The Cat and the Moon is very much inspired by Timothy Hutton’s character in Ordinary People. His journey of being so closed off and edgy to cracking open into this well of unmined emotion. Particularly the scene where he and Donald Sutherland, who’s amazing as well, are decorating the tree — ugh, the Christmas tree. It’s such a sweet scene. Mary Tyler Moore comes home, and she’s got this cold, dark look on her face. I’ll never get over her facial expressions in that movie. What she’s thinking versus what she’s putting on the surface is the most genius magic trick. It’s the most exhilarating thing ever. That movie is the best."

"I was really into them for a long time in the 70s and it coincided with early drug influences and when I jumped from the kind of psychedelia that the Beatles put forth to kind of what was happening in our own backyard on the West Coast with the Airplane and the Dead and Quicksilver.. The Beatles stopped so I never got the chance to see them, but the Dead came around a lot and so you got to see those bands. The Grateful Dead delved really deep into acoustic music, that was really important, and later their famous electric records, but Anthem of the Sun was in their early period. One of the things I keep talking about with my new record Electric Trim is that it was really created in the studio and I keep mentioning Dark Side of The Moon or Pet Sounds or Revolver or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when I should be referencing Anthem of the Sun Anthem of the Sun was the kind of record that they were trying to construct in a studio. It’s a studio experience of a live concert experience, so they were mixing all this stuff they recorded in all the studio with all these different live takes, slowing things down and speeding things up and thinking of all these trippy aspects of the way the sound exists in stereo space. A couple of those guys, especially Phil Lesh trained alongside Steve Reich at school and studied Luciano Berio and all this 20th century modernist stuff, so he was aware of where music was going on that level and they were just at a cross roads where they weren’t sure they wanted to be a straight ahead rock band. They had moments of being a rock dance band and then they had other aspirations. I love listening to Anthem of the Sun because it may not be perfect, or achieved what they really wanted, but it’s one of those records that set its sights really high and whether or not it got all the way there it achieved something really unique. There’s not many records that sound like that, not just the fact they were splicing together live tapes from 30 different gigs, it was kind of a ridiculous stoned or drugged task from the beginning but they threw their back against the wheel, and tried to do it. If you ever listen to that record with headphones it’s so rich. I was really into them for a long time but once New York City punk and all that stuff happened I kind of dropped it like a hot potato and went onto other stuff and it was only in the last 7 or 8 years that I’ve come back to my appreciation of it through a number of different avenues. I was involved a couple of years ago with this record that this group The National put together called Day of the Dead where they covered 60 songs or something and they asked me to cover ‘Mountains of the Moon’. There were a couple of good Dead songs I was listening to at the time because they related to a song I was doing for my record with The Dust – Last Night on Earth and when I went to record with them they played me a lot of the songs they were working on and whether you like 30 minute noodling electric guitar solos or not you can put that aside and say the thing that impressed me about what they were doing was how great their song writing was. Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter especially, wrote a lot of amazing songs together and that’s what really struck me – that’s why I liked these guys way back when because they had really great songs. Their songs are like the 60s era American songbook. And it was also in this period where I was thinking that I wanted a lyrical collaborator and so the idea of Hunter’s role with Garcia in that band especially or like when Dylan turned to either Robert Hunter or Jacques Levy for inspiration when he was working on Desire Dylan doesn’t need a lyrical collaborator - why’s he working with outside lyricists? And yet at some point he thought “I need someone else to shift the viewpoint”. So that’s what inspired me to ask Jonathan Lethem to work on Electric Trim. We’d known each other for a long time and I just felt like this was a good time to get someone else’s input, put another voice in the mix. Every single aspect of the record, words, lyrics, tunes didn’t have to spring from me. Music can be very collaborative and I’ve kind of come up in a very collaborative situation with Sonic Youth for so many years – every song was listed as all four of us writing it, ‘cos that’s ultimately what happened. In Sonic Youth, it was only a very rare occasion where one of us came in and said, “Hey I’ve got a new song this is how it goes…”

"This was very, very hard to put together and I’ve left out so many great songs. I could do a list of 150 songs at least, but ‘La Femme D’argent’ really leapt out. It’s the most electronic of the songs that I’ve selected. To this day, every time I listen to Air, it makes me fall in love with electronic music but in a way that reminds me that you can marry electronic music and, let’s say, traditional instruments, especially the bass guitar. Air are absolute geniuses with basslines, they have a great tone and it’s such a good homage to Serge Gainsbourg and stuff like that. Their sense of melody and structure and building up a song is quite something. They make the best background music that you want to play louder than the conversation that you’re having. I love it for driving, if I don’t know what to listen to, I’ll probably stick on Moon Safari or Premiers Symptômes, which is an EP that’s not talked about that much. So many of their tracks - ‘La Femme D’argent’ being a strong example - are really inspiring from a production point of view. It’s all about the little world that these tracks live in, where it couldn’t be anyone but Air. Bands like Zero 7 have copied Air, but it’s just not as good. You know something has a really unique quality when if you were to try to write a song in that style, people would know straight away; it would be like, ‘Oh, that sounds like Air.’ I think there’s other bands that manage it, take The Strokes when they did Is This It - you can sound like Is This It, there’s a world that that record is in. I could literally go downstairs right now and make a song that’s like Air and people would definitely say it sounds like Air, but if I recorded a song in the style of a band that doesn’t really have a unique quality in terms of recording or production, people would say, ‘Oh, it just sounds like an indie band.’ I never go out and want to copy anything. Rather than listen to it, I basically fast on music when I’m writing and recording, because I’m afraid of subconsciously taking inspiration from somebody else. I mean, you do that any way - you can’t help it - but when I’m asked, ‘What music were you listening to when making this album?’ I tend to reply, ‘No one, really.’ Again, you can’t not listen to music as it’s everywhere, but it’s different in terms of immersing oneself. Like when I got into Scott Walker, I would just listen to his albums, Scott 1, 2, 3 and 4 all the time, but I don’t think you should do that when you’re recording your own music. A while back, I was listening to a song off the most recent Arctic Monkeys record, ‘Four Out of Five’ and it occurred to me that they obviously had been listening to Lou Reed, because there’s that one melody that sounds exactly like ‘Satellite of Love.’ The bit that goes, “Take it easy for a little while…” that’s very obviously “Satellite of Love”. It’s like, come on. They are very open about what they listen to, but that’s just lifted. I think it’s their best record, but in terms of that particular lift they were either aware of it or they were listening to Lou Reed on the tour bus or obsessed with the Bowie/Lou Reed partnership or something. Generally, I do worry about that, because people compare our songs to things. The worst is when people say ‘Shelter Song’ is just ‘Ticket to Ride’, it’s nothing like ‘Ticket To Ride', it’s got a twelve-string guitar on it, that’s like saying any guitar song sounds like Robert Johnson or the Edge or someone!"