"The thing about Beck was that he felt like a well-kept secret for a while. I can’t actually remember how I stumbled upon him, but it was way back around the time of his second album Stereopathetic Soulmanure, that was before he had his big breakout, crossover albums. This track is from Mellow Gold, which was his third album and had ‘Loser’ on it, so other people were starting to pick up on him, finally. I couldn’t believe that nobody else had heard of this amazing talent; he was completely doing his own thing and you could tell he had real soul. The fact that this was around the time of Britpop just made him stand out all the more to me, I couldn’t stop listening to his early stuff. ’Truckdrivin Neighbors Downstairs (Yellow Sweat)’ sums up what I loved about him in those days and why I still do now. It crystallised the appeal of those records, it’s got such an amazing narrative and it was obvious that it was a true story, that he really had lived above or below that truck driver who was on weird speed or angel dust. He just encapsulates that sort of nightmarishness of having problems with the neighbours and the pitched-down vocals make it sound totally ominous. There’s such an experimental flavour to it musically and lyrically and you can hear how he would cut and paste ideas. That’s how those early albums were - every track different to the last. I love everything he’s done really and that experimental flavour has never really left him, all the way up to making a pop record with Colors. I absolutely battered his first few albums though and for a while I felt like I was the only one. The guy’s a real one-off."

"One of the first records I ever bought was Chubby Checker's 'Twistin Round The World'. He was a cultural phenomenon because the twist in those early days was a really big thing. He had an afternoon TV show every day called where he would show people how to do the twist. All it was was a green screen in those days and him doing all that stuff. I studied him, like anything else. Ernest Evans was his real name, and Kal Mann wrote those records, but the irony is that 'The Twist' was not originally recorded by Chubby Checker. It was recorded by Hank Ballard And The Midnighters, that was the original and he sounds just like Chubby. Chubby changed his name from Ernest Evans to Chubby Checker after Dick Clark's wife says, 'He reminds me of a young Fats Domino'. Fats, Chubby. Checker, Domino. Again, 'Twistin Round The World', with the globe behind it and everything, it showed me that this was a global phenomenon. That told me something. That's when I started to be aware that there are songs, then there are artists, and then there is the informational gathering of how you tell people how big you are, how famous you are. I remember later on that I saw an advertisement for Sabbath in Rolling Stone, and the ad said: 'Black Sabbath: Louder Than Led Zeppelin', I thought that was genius. It didn't say it was better, just louder. Chubby Checker had so many hits. Obviously 'The Twist', 'Let's Twist Again', 'Pony Time', 'The Fly', 'Limbo Rock', lots of stuff! He must have had 20 hits. Great music isn't just songs; it's also a social tool, like a favourite song that people used to get married or something like that."