"This is when I first started taking my bass seriously. This was this was a when I got hungry to understand what it meant to play bass. I thank God that there was a Stanley Clarke as a frame of reference to what to what is possible with the bass, along with Jaco [Pastorious] and Marcus Miller. There was a period where I stopped liking the practice, I was like 'uh I don't wanna practice', and my mom was really clever about it. She offered to pay me to transcribe Stanley Clarke's School Days. And of course, I'm like, 'I want to buy comic books and Marvel cards', so of course I transcribed School Days. Journey to Love and School Days became really personal to me. It was just like, I felt like this was my n**, and I felt like this was who I am; I identified with those two albums. I didn't even discover the self-titled album until later in life; I was very much married to School Days and Journey to Love. I think that Journey to Love is still very much a story to me that I feel resonates in my mind and body. I don't know what you would call it musically, but I paraphrased the album on my very first album, sonically."

"This is a very important album for me. When John Peel was alive, before he went off on the holiday that he didn’t come back from, he asked a few of us to look after his radio show for him – Siouxsie Sioux, Robert Smith – and he said that Rick and I could do anything we wanted, which was very generous of him. So Rick asked him if there was anything he wanted us to play and he handed us Tripper and said, “this has just come in and I really like it.” As somebody who grew up with John being my most important musical teacher, especially his philosophy around cross-collateralised ideas between musical genres – this was important because it was the last album he ever gave me. The last record he asked to be played on air. But I loved the sound of the album – again, they have a whole other structure for writing songs. They have this filmic quality. It’s a very panoramic sound. They were one of the first bands I ever heard using that glitchy, cut-up electronic vibe and yet incorporating it with traditional instruments. And when I go and see them live, sometimes they’re a three-piece, then a seven-piece, or they’ll have an orchestra with them – they defy definition. They just make beautiful music."

"Nina is another friend that we were introduced to via John Peel and his family. There were a number of people after his passing that I really wanted to get in touch with and Nina was one of them. That was John’s legacy. That and one-stop shopping, something that Radio 1 would benefit from the asset of again. John was a place where you could go to hear very disparate music – some of which you would love, some which you would loathe, and some of which you would loathe but come to love. Nina was one of the people that he played a lot. This was the album when I met her and her fella. She’s an extraordinary singer – for me, I think the greatest contemporary female lyricist. She and her boyfriend live in a tiny flat in Manhattan, almost like Russian peasants. There are lots of stuffed animals and huge rugs on her tiny bed and laptops hidden behind huge automatons. I love her guitar playing and her singing, but her lyrics challenged me to try to be as good. She writes from a woman’s point of view, beautifully. Her lyrics are very personal. I struggled with that before writing Edgeland. This, and the John Martyn album, and the James Blake album – they were all writing very personal songs."