"She is a Turkish goddess. It is folk [music] in its essence, I suppose, but this record is fierce. She is angry and compelling and this record fires me up. It was when I was on tour with Gruff [Rhys] – maybe about eight years ago – and Andy Votel was with us and doing DJ sets and he was playing 'Ince Ince' from this record. I had become a bit lazy about discovering music and had become a bit fatigued at listening to new things. Suddenly Andy is playing music like Selda and it was so exciting. He opened a world of new music to me. I started listening to things by Iranian female musicians like Googoosh and also to Susan Christie's Paint A Lady album. It was all incredibly exciting music that I hadn't known about it. It was like opening Pandora's Box to me. I would play it to everyone I possibly could. I would constantly be saying, ""Have you heard this record by Selda? It's one of the best records I have ever heard"" and I would get it out and play it to anyone. It would always get the same reaction. I remember playing it to St Vincent when I was touring with her and she lost her shit when she heard it. I think she subsequently went on to cover one of the songs. Last year I was playing a show in Switzerland in this old cinema which was absolutely incredible. It had a huge disco ball and we were having a bit of a lock-in. We were having our own private disco in this cinema and I put a Selda track on and everybody just went absolutely apeshit. It is just a record that you cannot get fatigued by – I was listening to it this morning and got excited all over again. The synths and the electric sitars on it are so infectious – the album is like a musical virus. I recommend everyone listens to it."

"Actually you'll hear that a lot of my choices, I realise, are to do with singing and people whose singing styles just so engaged me. I was walking past a kebab shop in North London and I heard this song, and this singer just made my stomach go funny. So I went into the shop and said, ""What are you playing?"" and what he was playing was one of those CDs with about a thousand MP3s on them. I asked him what track it was and he didn't know. I thought, ""I must find this singer"", so I said, ""Can I buy the record from you?"" He didn't want to sell it, you see, because it was the only music they had in the shop. So I gave him £55 for it. He saw a sucker [laughs]. So I got this CD and I went through track after track after track, and I finally find the song, but of course there were no names or anything because it was just a burnt CD. So I went back into the shop with one of my ghetto blasters and said, ""Okay, this is the song, what is it?"" He didn't know so I asked him if he knew anyone that would know so he said, ""Well, I'll ring my dad."" So I'm holding it up to the phone and his dad is down the other end and he says, ""Oh well that's Belkis Akkale, obviously."" She's singing here on the last track of this album ('Ötüşün Kuşlar') by a songwriter called Arif Sag. There's three great singers on this track and Belkis Akkale comes first. It's very interesting hearing the difference between their three voices. It's like a glossary of contemporary Turkish singing. Her voice is the one that does it for me. The other two don't have the erotic wobble that she has."