"He's also an anti folk artist and a friend. He's super underrated. For me there could be an alternative universe where Turner Cody is considered to be like Neil Young or Townes Van Zandt. He totally deserves that. His catalogue is as good as theirs, people need to wake up and hear it. This album is a good starting point to explore Turner's work. It's from the period of his life where he almost began to become the young Arthur Rimbaud. It's a very literary folk record, and he's also the most romantic anti folk songwriter. A lot of anti folk uses humour and satire, but Turner's stuff has always been deeply romantic without being particularly funny which sent him apart from the more punky stuff that went straight for your throat. He's a romantic, mystic poet who makes music. The title track actually paints New York City as an anthropological creature that's going through the processes of change. He really taps into corruption and decline and the surrounding elements that led into the financial crash, Occupy Wall Street, Brexit and Donald Trump. I feel like Turner understood these things were going to happen. If you listen to this record and his next one, Who Went West, it's all about what's happening now, yet he was just a 19-year-old who felt what would come. The lyrics are all prophetic in n that way, he understood what would happen in the world."

"I got a cassette from a cousin of mine that had The Offspring, Smash, on one side and Nirvana's Bleach on the other. That was definitely the wake-up call of rebellion and antagonism, but the first record I really got into from thereon was Surfer Rosa. It felt so alien but so familiar. It really clicked on a bone marrow level that felt like it had pre-existed for me. I bought Death To The Pixies at the same time on tape from HMV in Oxford and I just became obsessed with that record. I listened to it again recently and it reminded me particularly about how I could connect with Frank Black's lyrics despite not being aware of any real narrative when I was much younger. I don't think Foals would exist without the Pixies. I love the oddness and the strangeness of the Hispanic/punk/pop influence - it should be wrong, it shouldn't work but it does, really well. More recently I re-listened to his lyrics and appreciated how humorous they are, which reminded me that things don't need to be too obvious or narrative-based, they can be just fragments of thought. It opened the gateway into everything that then consumed me for the next ten years (Oxes, Albini, Sonic Youth, Godspeed - the American guitar alt/post-hardcore/post-rock world). Without Surfer Rosa I may have stayed with Nirvana and The Offspring…"

"Really Red are from Texas and they released Teaching You The Fear in 1981. My friend Smithy and I had a fanzine called Attack and that was one of the records that came through. Our first band Mr. Epp eventually played with them. There's a lot going on in that band for a so-called hardcore punk band. There was a lot of cool stuff coming out of Texas in the early 80s like Big Boys and The Dicks, a little later the Butthole Surfers. Really Red was quite a political band. So many political punk bands were really strident like Crass but in the wake of Maximumrocknroll fanzine many of them were 16-year-old kids spouting shit about stuff they didn't really understand. And who wants to take advice from someone with a very small worldview? Really Red were a little older, maybe five to eight years older than me, and I know this because Ronnie Bond eventually moved up to Seattle and I got to know him a little. Those guys were old enough that when The MC5 came through Houston in the early 70s they hung out with them. Really thoughtful guys but most importantly kick-ass songs. Kelly Younger was a really unique guitar player. They also referenced Nico and The Velvet Underground as well as political punk stuff. They just seemed a little broader than a lot of things that were happening at the time in the hardcore scene in particular."