"How I got to know about it was through knowing their original record label Kitty-Yo and working with people in Berlin and going over there, and then I met Ronald, and this album summed up a moment for me. Dance music had so completely dominated the 90s. Really you could only ever talk about music in terms of the beat. There was techno and electro and then there was drum & bass, and they were so dominant; there was no other music. I remember thinking at the time, at the height of drum & bass, why would you listen to any other kind of music besides drum & bass? That's the only kind of music there is. There's Britpop, but that's rubbish. And then towards the end of the 90s all that started to fade and there was Tortoise suddenly appearing with what Americans who didn't do dance music did as instrumental music. And then from Germany you had To Rococo Rot. I think they gave me that record, because I think the version I've got is a promo. And again it's one of those records we just listen to over and over again. Wire did a tour, I think it was in 2000, and when we started we hadn't provided any music to go on before the band. And in every venue they were playing something like Soundgarden. Sorry, but I can't stand Soundgarden. I can't take it. So then we said well why don't we give them some music to put on? And I had that album, so we had that on before every show and it was really good. It was like you have some thrashy support band and then some thrashy dirge playing after that and then Wire coming on and it's like an evening of dirge. So to lighten it up we put something else on that puts the audience in a different space. And it also set us up in a different way. We got to feel differently about what we were doing. It was very effective for that"

"Again, this is a real stoner record. But the thing with it was the method of tape loops and being experimental in the studio with tape. With not much other technology available you would do things with varispeed and loops. We only did it a couple of times but you end up with sixty feet of tape going round bits of microphone stands and chair legs and handles of the kettle and things like that, just to get it to play in a loop the way you want it to. And to then be able to build on top of that into something coherent and repetitive: in a way it really was the birth of techno. Certainly the more ambient stuff like The Orb, where they're saying yes, we like things that just keep going and are repetitive. But in a way again it's the dynamics of it, because what you really have is that the loop becomes the foundation and it becomes a mechanical thing where you don't actually need to listen to it once you've got the idea of it. It keeps going, your mind cancels it out and then you listen to what's going on above it and on top of that. So it is a kind of foundation thing, and it's almost like as a species, people like perfection. That's why we like laser beams and bubbles. And we like repetitive music and drum loops because our consciousness doesn't need to pay attention to them, but we admire them because they are perfect, and nothing else in the world is. That was the real value of Terry Riley for me. With the Damned's second album we had this song called 'You Know' and I remember Brian said it's just one riff and we keep repeating it. And I was thinking fucking hell, Brian, have you run out of ideas? But actually there is something that goes with that, which is that almost hypnotic groove that you can find yourself in when you're listening to it, or when you're playing it."

"With some of the other songs here I said ‘I wish I’d written that song’, but I did write this one. I figured I had to at least put in one song I wrote, so if nothing else it’s a guilty pleasure. “‘Even Though Our Love Is Doomed’ had a long birth on Strange Little Birds and it’s an important song to me. I came up with the title when I was driving. I called Shirley and said ‘I have this title’ and she loved it. I said I’d work on it but all I had was the idea for the chorus and for the longest time it just sat around. I made all these different demos of it, an alternative-rock one, a clubby techno one, another sounded kind of hip-hop and a folk version and I hated all of them. Shirley asked what happened to it and I told her I hadn’t found anything that fitted what I’d heard in my head, so she said I should just bring in a simple demo to hear. I got home that night and panicked, because all I had was the chorus, I figured I had to put an arrangement together, even if it was just a temporary holding pattern. I picked up a bass and played the riff at the start and for some reason I wrote all the lyrics, they just came out in five minutes. The lyrics work on a bunch of levels. It refers to our band, the things that we have to work through, trying to survive and understand what’s going on, and it works for me in terms of my personal relationships with people where there’s been difficult times. That’s really what the song is about, trying to realise that it’s worth fighting through difficult times if something’s worth holding on to. It’s a really personal song to me. I liked the sonic template of it and that was a big inspiration for Strange Little Birds. We wanted to make more of a cinematic, atmospheric sounding record and less of a rock record. I liked the way the sound of the music and Shirley’s voice worked together. The song is important to me in that sense and the lyrics mean a lot to me, they’re about people I know, our band and myself."