"In more recent years, I decided if I was going to play acoustic punk music I wasn’t going to be the guy that just bangs on a guitar. I wanted to learn how to play guitar and use it to dictate what I needed to say, as well as my lyrics. So I took online lessons to learn about finger picking and I learnt Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits, note for note. I think it’s one of the most beautiful love songs in the world, and I love the fact that he doesn’t even sing it. He just talks it. I adore Mark Knopfler for that. He seems so unaffected in this song. He didn’t care about Wham! or Oingo Boingo or whatever was popular at the time. He just said, ‘I’m singing like this and I’m finger picking because that’s what I love.’ That goes right back to Bob Dylan for me: from Just Like a Woman to Romeo and Juliet. And when I finally learn how to play that song note for note I’m going to play it for people."

"George Clinton is very important to us. In fact, George, Sly Stone, Miles Davis and Curtis Mayfield are all people we're inspired by and look up to. I'm lucky to have become friends with George. We played a show last year with his band in London and he's just an amazing guy. I remember getting this album, listening to it and thinking, "Free your mind and the rest will follow." It's free, psychedelic, sexualised funk. Also, there are incredible lyrics. George is a great lyricist, one of the best. On one track, George was told to play a guitar solo and imagine that he was just told that his mother had died. Funkadelic can go from real, emotional, plaintive with a song like 'Maggot Brain' to a big, acoustic funk track. The message from the band is that you can do anything. George had many great musicians in his band and he changed it around, you just never know who was going to play on the track. It always sounds like Funkadelic because of George's vision."

"This song was a sonic influence on the record. The vocal sitting on top of things that aren't a conventional band, with some electronic instruments, some keyboards and some beats. The voice is still the main focus, but there's stuff happening around it that isn’t conventional. It was definitely an inspiration to some of the songs on this record; it was like a sonic headspace. “I’ve been a fan of Arthur Russell for a long time. I don't remember who showed me him but maybe it was on a highschool mixtape. Sometimes you just hear somebody; you can tell that it's unique, it's interesting and you want to know more about it. “With 'Nothing Sacred / All Things Wild' for example, which is the third song on Oh My God, I first tried it with an acoustic guitar and it wasn't really working, but then when we used just an organ and my vocal and that seemed to really work. Something like that would be really influenced by something like Arthur Russell."

"One of my favourite contemporary new music pieces to come out in the past couple of years. She's been composing music for 20 years. This album came out last year so I've been sitting with it, going back to it this year as well. But what strikes me is how patient the music is; it develops very slowly. The ideas are really exciting. So when she marinates on a single idea for a while, it doesn't feel boring. The idea is so strong, you just want to hear it fold over on itself over and over again. And the marriage between the acoustic and the electronic in that piece is really seamless – the recording is so good too. She studied with Kaija Saariaho – another huge Finnish composer. I hear her maybe taking some elements of her way of working, although simplifying it, maybe drawing it out more. That might oversimplify what is going on here, because Ratkje does a vast amount of different kinds of music. But it was yet another element – you can hear that lineage within her work."

"I was aware of Bill Callahan through Smog and that, but I think these latest records that he's done are amazing. They're quite abstract in a way, it's really quite something, the lyrics are really good but the music is also really imaginative and the song structures are quite weird. He definitely doesn't stick to the pop song structure that I was talking about earlier on, but it is melodic, it's not atonal or anything. His records have a natural, very close sound, but it isn't straight folk or anything like that, the instruments are acoustic but then he goes off into these different realms. I think the latest record, that I'm just trying to get my head around at the moment, continues that. He's really thought of it as an album, it's a double and it's split up into four sides, and I know that when he was letting people know about it they released a side at a time, so it's conceived as those four or five songs sitting together as a suite. It's the best record I've heard in ages."