"I love every album by Kanye, and I covered part of "Heartless" from the 808s & Heartbreak album [in]. But if I had to pick just one, I would pick My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I remember listening to it for the first time, and it was like a proper, physical shock. It still feels really modern. It sums up everything I love about Kanye: excess, the production, memory, the future. It's comic, it's tragic, it's extravagant—and at the centre there's this one voice, and it's an angry man battling his demons. It's very much an album in format, as well—I wouldn't choose just one song. It's an experience. Sometimes I forget about this album, voluntarily, and I go back to it and discover something else. It's like a hydra, with a hundred heads."

“This book scared the shit out of me. I picked it up after watching the film adaptation by Tarkovsky, which is one of my favourite movies. Sometimes I feel like the only explanation for human life is that our planet is a terrible god. I like thinking that planets are living, sentient behemoths that we completely misunderstand. I’m horrified to think what it would be like if such an abstract sentience had no regard for us, or enjoying toying with us. The act of repeatedly killing a doppelganger or a loved one seems so horrific; how could anyone think of something so awful? Whenever people pour cream into coffee in a clear glass, it reminds me of this book, because that’s what I imagine the surface of Solaris to look like.”

"This is another song that we started listening to early on in the studio, we wanted to create a universe similar to 'Hanky Panky Know How'. It's a beautiful song, it's another one where the production is like Death of a Ladies' Man. The chorus is so strange, what does that mean, you know? But somehow he still finds a way to make it beautiful and for whatever reason, that influenced us. “There's also something about the way he delivers it. When he sings it, you feel something - ‘Oh, that's so good! but what's he saying?’ And then you look it up, ‘Hanky Panky Know How’ and you have no idea what it means! Sometimes it’s just about the way things sound and feel. You can say anything as long as it feels good."

"All of his albums are just collections of songs because this was in the pre-album era, but I guess there was one in Mississippi called Key To The Kingdom. He was a spiritual blues singer who played an instrument, a fretless zither. Even though it's the blues era, he can't bend the notes like a guitar player would. He's sometimes known as George Washington Phillips. His music is really serene and otherworldly and pure. It's all very religious but it has its own atmosphere that I've not really heard anywhere else. I think when I really got into Washington Philips was when Sonic Boom put a song of his onto a compilation album called Space Lines. My sister painted a picture of him for Christmas. My sister the painting goth."

"As a teenager in the late 70s I wasn't really interested in contemporary pop music or punk-rock, I was listening to stuff from 10 years earlier. This was a big record for me. Sometimes when I'm singing – it occurred to me last night in Istanbul – I realise there's a certain kind of vocalising I do that takes its cue from Leon Russell. He sang in a southern accent but it was very blown-out and exaggerated, very free and loose. I got this record as a gift for playing in the baseball team at junior high – I loathed sports but there weren't enough people to complete the team. So the coach said, have as many records as you want, just please be on the baseball team. I was like, all right I'll do it."