"‘Wichita Lineman’ was my Mum’s favourite song, she played it all the time. Anytime I hear it now it takes me back to being a kid and reminds me of growing up in Viroqua, Wisconsin. I grew up in a small town and with the sound and production of this song I can visualise the bleak Midwestern cornfields and driving through them. Jimmy Webb wrote it and it’s an iconic, beautiful and incredible song, the lyrics have this bittersweet longing and desire that I think a lot of people can relate to. There’s regret in there, because the protagonist isn’t doing what he wants to do and it’s a perfect pop song in some ways. I was ten years old when my parents first took me to a concert and it was a Glen Campbell show. He was a big TV star with a network television show, it was a big tour and he was incredible. I didn’t know anything about concerts but I remember there were ten thousand people at The Dane County Coliseum, it was a massive show and it was eye-opening. I was probably seven or eight years old when I first heard ‘Wichita Lineman’. My Mum played music in the house all the time and music was part of the background of growing up in our household. She bought Beatles records, The Tijuana Brass, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, musicals like Oklahoma and West Side Story, Polka and Country records. She played everything and I was exposed to all of it, it was good for me growing up to be exposed to a diverse catalogue of music, I’ve never felt elitist about music."

"Jonathan Richman sounded a bit like Lou Reed. The songs were fantastic. The only place you could buy that album was the Rock On store in Camden Town. I think everybody, including John Rotten and all of the Pistols, had been down there at some point to buy it. Anybody that later got into the punk rock scene had bought this record. It still sounds really good. John Cale produced it. It's under-produced if anything, which is what's so good about it. His voice is great. American punk rock was completely different from the London scene – you had Richard Hell & the Voidoids and Television and that, and it all seemed a bit arty. But this was four college kids from California who had got together and made a dark record. It sounds like a guy who's had his heart broken. It's a romantic punk record, really. 'Roadrunner' is the one everybody learnt when they were rehearsing or trying to get into a band. The way he sang, he just sort of threw it away. I can't really think of anybody who'd done it like that before. The solos were great, just one or two notes. Very simple stuff, which was what appealed to the punks. The whole punk thing was about stripping things down because people couldn't play very well. Get the band first and worry about the music later. I saw Jonathan Richman last year doing a festival somewhere, just him and a drummer. He's the only person I know who tells the sound guy to turn it down. But back then he was streets ahead of everyone."

"Growing up in America in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s every Sunday evening there was The Walt Disney Hour on TV and before they played whatever Walt Disney movie or animation that was on, they would always begin with ‘When You Wish Upon a Star.’ This was probably the first embedding of music into your DNA outside of something that your parents might listen to on the radio, this was something that was wholly your own, because this was children’s music. “Your parents would plop you down in front of the television set on a Sunday night and this was your hour of music basically, so for myself, Grasshopper and a number of other people this otherworldly song was really the first music that informed you. Whatever music was to come in your life, this was the first information that was literally downloaded into your bloodstream. “Early on in Mercury Rev we were using feedback and Grasshopper was using guitar elements, because we’d yet to learn how to score orchestrally ourselves, we were just too young. Yerself is Steam was our early attempt at orchestrating but we were using feedback and noise and basically any note we could grab on the fretboard or the piano, because we weren’t really accomplished rock musicians. Like everyone, when you begin you sort of fumble around. “The idea of the layering and the dynamics that are in some of those very early Disney movies, such as Fantasia or Pinocchio was definitely in our consciousness. It was definitely one of the few things we could lean on as teenagers."

"I actually own a print of this. It’s one of those movies that was pivotal [for] me. I remember it screened in 16mm at my high school. The emotional power of that movie — it’s the first time I ever felt such intense emotion watching a film. I wasn’t that well-versed in film in high school, but I knew I was being hit by something incredibly powerful. What really struck me was Marlon Brando’s performance. And I know that’s easy to say, but that’s why I never get tired of watching the film, and why I really wanted to own a print because there’s a level of acting there that went beyond anything I had seen before. And it still ranks as maybe the best performance I’ve ever seen on film. I find it fascinating every time I watch it. Plus he’s surrounded by a brilliant cast and also the location — the way the film was shot on location — at that time, it had never been done before. All of that adds to the fact that I have a pretty lousy print of the movie but that’s what’s fun about it — it even feels more real. And then Criterion — to be completely geeked out — released it again last year, and I didn’t know it was shot in three different formats. Television was becoming popular at the time so they didn’t know if they would go widescreen with it, 1:85, or the typical way I think it was released, which I think is 1:66, but it’s fascinating to look at those versions as well. This is one of the greats."