"Obviously, I'd been listening to hip hop since the mid-80s and kept half an eye on all that stuff as it grew. I was involved in rave culture really early, Spiral Tribe raves and stuff like that and clubbing in Leeds in the early 90s. There was always this really hard UK Garage sound that was great. I loved it. Wiley's come from being a kind of garage MC, one of those guys we listened to on pirate radio in Leeds. He's still got that really underground sound, the way he spits and he never loses that energy either. I was listening to his first album the other day and it still sounds like the future to me. It sounds so contemporary. When you actually analyse grime rhythms, a lot of it is from Nubian rhythms and a lot of the scales are Nubian scales, Algerian scales. When you hear grime, it just sounds like someone's car in the street in London. But then you analyse it and you realise there's all these global influences - it sounds like the whole world. This is what I wanted Melt Yourself Down to be. I wanted to try and create a sound that felt like the whole world."

"This was the first record of his that I liked. I think it's really aggressive, in a good way, and hard. I always associated with Michael Jackson with all the Thriller stuff, which I didn't really like, but I thought this was a real step out from that safe zone that he'd been in. I'm not a Michael Jackson expert, but this is one of those records that you have to play really really loudly. The production on it is amazing. Apparently we did one of those award ceremonies, what are they called in the UK? The Brits. That's it. I was there with Alison [Moyet, Yazoo vocalist] and he was there and I don't really remember, because I was into not being starstruck, and Alison saw him and she leapt over the security guards and gave Michael Jackson a massive kiss, it was really funny. All the security guys were looking on going, "What the fuck was that?' I think there's a picture of us with all these really famous people like Paul McCartney, all lined up looking like geeks. I guess Dangerous was the closest he got, not to my style of production, but a more synthetic sound."