"""If you want to pick a Dusty Springfield album, it is tricky because you are not going to get the benefit of having some of the singles. The greatest thing about Dusty Springfield was her run of singles, but pure greatest hits albums are easy to wear out and you end up wanting a little bit more. This record does it all for me. It's from that period where she was undeniably the best singer in pop music and that includes singers from the US too. There is a sound to this album that is rough pop and soul without it getting too purist. It was made by someone who was very serious about what she did and had a voice that I don't think has ever been bettered. There is a desperation in the way she sings that made her a fascinating person and a person with some depth. It's a great combination that seems to keep cropping up - where pop music is made by an interesting character. I sometimes get a little tired of forty-somethings cataloguing American music from the 60s. It always get a little predictable and the same names crop up, like Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. While you aren't ever going to get around that, in this case because it is Dusty Springfield singing those songs, there is an edge to them and something more interesting. I know it is a conceptual idea, but sometimes you want authenticity to be played with a bit. With Dusty being an intriguing, white, part-Irish woman who had completely reinvented herself in the middle of the Tin Pan Alley pop machine, she was able to put a weird slant on her music. She put another angle on songs that were already great and - put it this way - I prefer her versions to the originals."

"This is pretty amazing. I think this is Geoff Emerick’s first go as engineer. He’d been working there [at Abbey Road studios] but he hadn’t become an engineer yet. When I was working with Paul McCartney on his album, Flaming Pie, Geoff was the engineer as well. He told me what a marvellous thing it was for him because he used this close mic ambience on this album and did some really amazing effects, like on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Backwards stuff and all that and this was pretty advanced stuff in them days. It was more experimental than anything they’d done before. Some of the tunes on there are just great and it was them nearly getting into Sgt Pepper, you know? Probably doing more experimenting and copying tapes and bouncing them across. They hadn’t got the tracks to do it, really, so they had to use two machines and sometime three machines and then mix everything down from four tracks onto one and then start on another and mix that down to another machine. So it was very difficult to make those records, I would imagine. How did it sound back in ’66? Way better than everything else, I would say. It stood out like a sore thumb really. It was so tight and beautiful and punchy. It was the punchiest thing around. It was, like, powerful and, it seemed to me, majestic."

"This is a fascinating record and it has such an amazing story. Marc Hollander was Aksak Maboul, they were his crew in the 80s, and he started Crammed Discs in Belgium. He was married (still is) to Veronique Vincent [of the Honeymoon Killers]and they were recording an album in I think about 1983, and then a baby arrived, so that took over. So they left the record practically finished but not quite finished, in the drawer. And then another baby arrived, so that record got even further and deeper into its drawer! It got forgotten. And then some years ago they discovered it, and played it and thought okay, this is good stuff. Obviously Marc had the label, so they mixed it and released it, and there it was: the Ex-Futur Album. My personal connection to this record is that people kept saying oh, it sounds like Stereolab, except they did it ten years before we did! They're sort of our parents, and that's really amazing to me. We've been separated and found again later on; it's a really lovely experience, and it also makes so much sense with the kind of label that Marc is running. It's very open, and they're very open-minded people, accepting the differences, and it's what I find most attractive: the fusion, when you go get some DNA from here and there and over here and then cram it all into a song."