"I was a big fan of Eno from day one. I brought Oblique Strategies from Rough Trade way, way back. It was a black box of cards that had different phrases on them like, ""Reverse it"" and ""Start in the middle"" – all kinds of possibilities. I loved his early stuff. The track 'Baby's on Fire' from Here Come The Warm Jets is great. Roxy were never the same without him. He was commissioned to write this music by Al Reinart who was making a documentary from footage shot of the lunar landings. It's a marvelous record. After a show or a long day's work it's the ultimate one to stick on, get in the bath, cup of tea, a stick of incense and you're laughing. It's more musical than the rest of his ambient stuff. There are bits of it that have a country and western twang."

"My whole thing has gone playlist now, so I'll have this on my headphones now as I walk around because sitting down to listen to two sides of vinyl is less frequent in my life. But certainly when I bought Live Evil, it was the only record that I played for months! And quite deeply so. A friend had lent me an album on CBS, which had an inner sleeve and on this inner sleeve would be descriptions of other records. And on one of them was a journalist wordily describing this as something like, ""… an exploration of a sonic journey"", and that really set my imagination off. And the cover of Live Evil is fantastic. It just looked like a fascinating object, and it was a double album as well. It was a high-risk purchase. But playing this record, it was like, ""Wow! What is this amazing, glowing world?"" And it had these Hermeto Pacoal tracks on it that are really ambient – 'Nem Un Talvez' is one and 'Little Church' is the other – and those tracks really got me. Back then there was no particular place to start listening with what would become ambient music. There were pieces that were beatless but these were deeply coloured and were way before Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze records, which we didn't have much patience for. But there's so much bursting out of this record. Most of it is recorded live and the fact that John McLaughlin was on it really makes it for me, and he's just an amazing artist and guitarist. On this record, he's free as a bird and it's just mental. He just lights up this record. [Keyboardist] Keith Jarrett's on it, and he's a particularly complicated improviser. I jumped into that world and the ripples from diving into that pond, I just follow them. All the people that played on that record came out of Miles Davis' world."

"There’s something very quirky about the two records Brian Eno made just after he left Roxy Music. They feel naturally 'him’, in a way, like he didn’t really think about it too much. He did it very quickly, in a sort of 'of-the-time’ kind of way, and those records really brought out his character more than any other music he’s done over the years, even including his ambient stuff – I think he thinks about all that ambient stuff too much, in a way. The earlier records feel like they were done with humour and fun. Obviously there’s a big cash incentive if you’re asked to produce Coldplay or U2, they’re difficult things to turn down if you’re any producer. But I think it’s been debilitating for him, he should just be more experimental. [But] I do hear a lot of good stories about his approach and the way he coaxes the best out of people as a producer. There was a bit of a connection between him and Depeche Mode – he did some remixes for 'I Feel You', which were called the Swamp mixes, and they’re typical Eno. They sound exactly like the kind of thing you’d expect him to do, and I loved them. And I thought they were great. There was a connection because Flood had worked with on the U2 records, and they’d hired a house and built a studio there, and all lived together to make a record. I said 'That’s a great idea, let’s do the same thing’. And it was a total disaster. We lived together and recorded together, and of course, it was one of the most uncreative recording sessions… actually, it wasn’t really – it was one of the most difficult recording sessions we’ve ever had. We were all living in this house and nothing was getting done, and yet, when I look back and see what we produced over a very long period of ten weeks, we recorded three of the best Mode tracks ever."