"I found out about the Cardiacs and discovered A Little Man And A House And The Whole World Window and On Land And In The Sea simultaneously. They’re very hard to find now, the CDs are going for upwards of 60 or 70 quid on eBay. It’s progressive music, but done in a really mental way. It sounds like one guy’s mind being acted out by some willing and accomplished musicians. It’s really insane. There are loads of tempo changes. I think Tim Smith’s voice sounds a little like Robert Smith, but in a much more manic way. I think that’s what really speaks to me [laughs]. It’s almost like what progressive rock is made for. You expect progressive rock to be manic. The production sounds a little bit more like a real band on On Land And In The Sea, but on A Little Man And A House And The Whole World Window there’s a song on it called ‘R.E.S.’ which is just seven minutes of strange music. It’s like 60s easy listening music but it’s still definitely prog. I was criticised once actually. We did a trip into the rain forest in Costa Rica last year and I DJed it, and afterwards everyone was like, “yeah that was great… maybe too much Cardiacs though.” It’s a floor filler, but a floor emptier as well – and it’s hard to know where the threshold is! On those albums there are a lot of people called Smith, and I’m not sure whether they’re brothers or cousins or aunties or whatever, but there’s a saxophonist, bassist, guitarist, keys, and it’s all very symphonic. More symphonic than you’d expect."

"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."

"This is a very important album for me. When John Peel was alive, before he went off on the holiday that he didn’t come back from, he asked a few of us to look after his radio show for him – Siouxsie Sioux, Robert Smith – and he said that Rick and I could do anything we wanted, which was very generous of him. So Rick asked him if there was anything he wanted us to play and he handed us Tripper and said, “this has just come in and I really like it.” As somebody who grew up with John being my most important musical teacher, especially his philosophy around cross-collateralised ideas between musical genres – this was important because it was the last album he ever gave me. The last record he asked to be played on air. But I loved the sound of the album – again, they have a whole other structure for writing songs. They have this filmic quality. It’s a very panoramic sound. They were one of the first bands I ever heard using that glitchy, cut-up electronic vibe and yet incorporating it with traditional instruments. And when I go and see them live, sometimes they’re a three-piece, then a seven-piece, or they’ll have an orchestra with them – they defy definition. They just make beautiful music."

"What can you say? He's Nick Cave. He belongs in this mysterious closet. I love that he's so impossible to categorise. I remember hearing his music for the first time when I was 15 or 16, and having no idea what to make of him. I almost still don't. He belongs in a genre unto himself. The one thing I love so much about Nick Cave is that he's a master craftsman. He considers himself a writer, and you can really hear it in his songs in a way that's highly unusual. The way he crafts a song is like no other. He makes no bones about the fact that he's putting a certain kind of poetry to a certain kind of music in a way that just isn't really done nowadays. And he's an incredible performer. There are artists and there are songs, but then there are albums as albums, that really stand up as an entire record. Let Love In, for me, works as an entire record from the moment it opens to the moment it closes. But it also was the time. If I loved a band and they had an album that came out in the late 80s, early 90s, it was probably just more influential, because it was hitting me at a time that was so important. I actually got to meet him last year in Australia. I'd covered 'Ship Song' on a record of Australian songs, so I got to get Nick Cave transmission. Now I just need to get Robert Smith transmission and I'll have the holy trinity."