"I associate this album with a specific moment in my life. We never had a TV until I was about 16, so we would only hear about stuff like The Simpsons and Neighbours from friends. They seemed exotic and distant. But this one time I did see an episode of Neighbours in which one of the main characters got hit by a car, and it really fucked me up! I'd never seen anything like it before. And so, as I was driving home, my mum had Sgt. Pepper's on in the car and I was listening to 'A Day In The Life', and I was looking at a certain spot in the road, and I heard the line, which goes ""he blew his mind out in a car"", and it all suddenly came together. I imagined a car crash and I imagined this spot on the road and I imagined what I'd just seen with this song. And I think that is the first time that I genuinely understood the concept of death. I was probably only about five. That's the thing about The Beatles, you can get it into you from zero up. I never forgot that feeling of being petrified and understanding death for the first time. And the music did that to me. It wasn't Neighbours or the road, it was the fact that somehow that song had transported me and helped me to understand a real emotion. He [Lennon] had been dead about five years at that point. Children love The Beatles, and they love Queen, because there is something about those bands that is so colourful and fun and they create such a world. And the Sgt. Pepper's world is so easy to visualise, you can literally hear the crowd and the characters and the colours, the carnival air. It's all just magical. I've always enjoyed the fact that my band doesn't sound the same from song to song, and I think we get that from The Beatles. The Beatles were every type of band for ten years, and then they were nothing, which is probably why they are the most famous band in the world."

"I first heard Alan Lomax's work while I was at university. I did music with visual art and film, but luckily at that time, it was just before this tutor left that had run it for 25 years, and he was quite old school but great because it was still fairly shambolic as a course and there was some good soulful stuff. Alan Lomax did lots and lots of field recordings around America and archived folk, blues and negro music and porchstep music. This particular album is when he went to Mississippi and Louisiana state penitentiaries and documented the prisoners as they were working in cotton fields. They've got music in their blood and that's what came through, I think. It's just absolute badass, amazing rhythms and there's a sort of sex to the music - they're singing about [sings] "be my woman and I'll be your man!", because they're obviously randy as hell and stuck in a fucking prison and working under really difficult conditions in the heat. There are different tracks where you can hear a load of axes and chains, and they would sing along to the axes hitting the stone, choirs of beautiful voices of men. 'Old Alabama's a really good one and 'Rosie' and what's so interesting is that I would listen to that and instantly there'd be a spider diagram going out. PJ Harvey on To Bring You My Love's 'Goodnight', she just stands there with a stick and hits it and there's a guy doing slide guitar. Moby, embarrassingly, sampled loads of it for free. Nick Cave and loads of artists I've loved, you just see bits of it in their music, it's that deep, dark, gothic soul, blues music. This is the raw, concentrated, original bit. There's a kind of spiritual rawness to it, they're spiritual songs about missing love and family. "I'll spend the rest of my days in these four stone walls." The fact that this mad white guy from somewhere decided to go and capture all of these voices - I know there are a lot of rights issues surrounding Alan Lomax, but I think just in terms of being an archivist, I think a lot of that stuff would've been completely lost, so it's great."