"I guess it was originally two EPs, put together in one record. I don't have the original versions but the songs all feel like one record and it's kind of them at their catchiest. They were always a little bit creepy. Some of the other things that came out on Ralph Records like Renaldo and The Loaf were wackier but there was a creepiness to The Residents that I found very, very appealing. Do you know Long Gone John, the label boss from Sympathy For The Record Industry? I went down to visit him at his house in Long Beach. This band I was in, Bloodloss, was on tour and we all went over there because he released a couple of our records. We went to his house and he was just a massive collector of crazy rock stuff and also that kind of juxtaposed art, like Robert Williams paintings. The Residents came up and his eyes lit up. He was like, ""Come here, follow me"" and he took us to this back room, opened up a safe and pulled out a copy of Santa Dog their first record. He prized that so much he kept it in a safe!"

"This had a profound effect on me when I was really young. I was maybe eleven or twelve years old when I saw The Who play ‘My Generation’ on a TV show called The Smothers Brothers Show. I was sitting with my brother, sister and parents and I just freaked out at how powerful they were. Watching Keith Moon, I just couldn’t understand what he was doing. I’d never seen anyone play like that before, he blew up his bass drum at the end of the performance, it was unbelievable and that’s when I told my parents I wanted to get a drum set. My mum said “Well, if you want to get a drum set you’ll have to take lessons and keep up your piano lessons too.” I promised I’d do both and kept up my piano lessons for about a year, but then I dropped them and focussed on the drums and started trying to figure out how to play Rock and Roll. The Who are in my top five bands of all time, in my home studio in Los Angeles I’ve got photos of them spread throughout the studios and the hallways. They had everything, they looked cool, Pete Townsend was an incredible writer, the way he played the guitar with windmills and swooping arm movements, Roger Daltrey was a great singer and an iconic frontman and John Entwistle’s bass runs held the band together. They had an incredibly unique sound. I still love this song, it’s in my top ten greatest rock songs ever written. It speaks to the essence of the confusion of adolescence and even the confusion of being an adult and what kind of world we live in. It never gets old, it’s a constant recurring theme that every generation of kids grows up with."

"I’m a huge Oasis fan. I saw Supersonic a couple of months ago and I loved it. I like seeing Liam and Noel interact when they talk to each other because they’re clearly brothers, they go at each other and they’re funny, some of what they say is really articulate, some of it is completely at loggerheads. I remember I was in Los Angeles, heading to the studio listening to the K-Rock radio station and they said “Here’s the new song by a British band called Oasis” and ‘Live Forever’ came on and I just loved it, I turned it up really loud in the car. It’s the guitar riff and the sentiment behind the lyrics, but the second I heard Liam singing he was just going for it. He’s got one of the greatest rock voices there is, there’s a kind of sneer almost in the way he sings, it’s all attitude. Live Forever’ was my first impression of Oasis and it’s the template for what makes Oasis sound like Oasis. I love the tone and Noel’s guitar and I like the chord progression, but to me what makes Oasis Oasis is Liam’s singing. The songs that Noel sang are lovely, but he doesn’t have that same bravado that Liam has. It was a combination of the two of them, but it definitely needed Liam’s vocals out front and centre for the kind of attitude and swagger that he would bring to the song. Again, when I heard it I was ‘damn, I wish I’d written that song.’ It’s got a killer guitar riff and the chord progression is good. It’s dead simple and like most Oasis songs they’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, in fact usually Noel would admit he was just trying to write a good Beatles rip-off song!"

"The avant-garde comes to the mainstream. At the time, Terry Riley was an avant-garde composer. He still is, but he's probably more so known for his work in the late '60s. Indian music at the time was coming into focus because of The Beatles and psychedelic music. So his compositions - especially this one - were really hypnotic, very mantra-esque. I think Terry Riley influenced more in a pop sense than in a rock sense, and I think A Rainbow In Curved Air has probably equal influence to Sgt. Pepper's. And you can quote me on that! It's obviously where The Who got the name 'Baba O'Riley', where the band used synthesisers - that's from Terry Riley. We cut our teeth in Buffalo, NY, in the early '80s and in that time the place was at the height of avant-garde. They opened a music school where they featured all the greats - Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Tony Conrad - just a ton of avant-garde composers, who later became more famous. It was such a central point for the electronic avant-garde movement, one that hadn't been around since San Francisco in the late '60s. It influences everything that Grasshopper and I do. We have strange polarities of the melancholy, romantic side of us. Then we also have the avant-garde side of us. The rock & roll side of us is probably the least prominent in our music. One of our albums, Snowflake Midnight, is also our homage to that bygone era of electronic music. Once you put it on, you think, ""Oh that's where all that William Orbit and Moby stuff comes from."" If you look all the way back, that's Terry Riley. It was the beginning of synthesisers, arpeggio synths also, which eventually became modern dance music. It was his motif of making it more hypnotic."