"Hope Sandoval is one of my favourite female singers, her vocal tones are incredible. It’s the kind of voice that makes you fall in love with the person without knowing anything about them. Hope Sandoval sings on a few Massive Attack records too and they’re amazing. I love this whole Mazzy Star record, So Tonight That I Might See. It’s the kind of record I never get sick of. When I first heard it about 10 years ago it was because a girl I liked was into Mazzy Star. I’d heard the name but I’d never actually heard any songs. So I put ‘Bells Ring’ on and I thought it was amazing. Straightaway, I thought it was such a brilliant song and I knew I would definitely be listening to it a lot. The girl I liked said, ""Do you like Mazzy Star?"" so I just quickly said, “Yeah, I love them, I love ‘Bells Ring’, that’s my favourite song!” I later discovered she was annoyed because ‘Bells Ring’ was her favourite song and she felt like she couldn’t say so or it would be like she was copying me. What she didn’t know was that I had never heard it before and she was the one who introduced it to me. Sometimes I think that when someone introduces you to a song it’s better than finding it on your own, because then you connect it more with a specific time and place and it ends up meaning more. It’s the act of sharing. One of my favourite things about listening to music is passing it onto other people, when you play a record for someone and they play one to you. That’s how The Horrors became a band. Playing each other records that we hadn’t heard was how we became a group of friends and a band. Sharing music has always been really central to my life. It’s the same with creating Cat’s Eyes. Rachel and I exchanged playlists. Some people I know are so protective of the music they discover and try to hide their discoveries. That attitude is so far away from my attitude to music"

"Tobi Vail, the drummer from Bikini Kill told me about them, and I went to the record store and bought it and I smoked too much pot and listened to it and I was like, "WHAAAAAAAT?!" There was so much in it, and it was not because I was stoned, because then I listened to it not stoned and I still kept finding stuff in it. Sonically they really changed my world and the freedom and the looseness. They were funny, tough and experimental. In my small town there was a certain sound formula that people were doing and I was like, "Man!" I appreciated women being able to experiment outside of these genre boundaries. They sounded so determined and weird to me. They taught me about production. I listened to that album so many times to figure out how it was produced: which side the guitar was panned to, was there a double guitar? I would just sit here and pick it apart in a way that I had never wanted to pick something apart before. To me the sound of that album and the way it was produced was such a great reflection of their material. It just really got me thinking about and being excited about production. This was probably a couple of years into Bikini Kill. There was also a radio interview we heard with them, they were asked about sexism and stuff like that and every time they'd moan and make crazy dog noises because they clearly were always asked about gender and were so sick of it. I'm always trying to be super diplomatic but they were just such awesome brats. Some guy called up and was like, "I'm really interested in your show I can't wait to see it" and they were like, "I'm in the phone box around the corner", just making fun of him like he was some perv. They were fun punks and it's not just about the funniness of it but also about speaking back to power and you can do that through humour."