"I could have chosen the first record Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! or, to a lesser extent, Freedom Of Choice, but I like the rawness of Duty Now For The Future. I think the Eno production on the first one was great but this is just a little bit different. To me, they were very cynical but also really funny. They obviously created this whole myth for themselves. Devo had this whole package before bands really came up with that. They had this whole mythology built around them. Other people had that - I guess Magma had this whole mythology built around them so they're maybe not the first - but at the time it felt really futuristic and it felt like a whole new thing was happening."

"Why not check out a double-cassette VHS of a Russian sci-fi movie from the library in Bloomington, Indiana, in the summer of 1992? Had never heard of it, nor of Tarkovsky. I was checking out a movie every day, based on what narrow selection the library had on her shelves. I was not prepared for how bent my mind became through the experience of watching this movie. That summer, in addition to watching a movie every evening, I was working on the construction of songs with regularity for the first time in my life. Solaris restructured my consciousness for a moment and helped lead me to believe that the past = the present = the future. I’ve never seen the American remake, and, even though Soderbergh is so good, I think I never will."

"Before I dropped out to start the Pixies, I was in university in Massachusetts. [Future Pixies guitarist] Joey Santiago and I rented a house in the second year. I took the dark windowless room because it had a stereo and I would just sit in the dark and listen to Iggy Pop and XTC records for hours and hours. The one I listened to the most, though, was This Year's Model. They had it on cassette tape at the music library in college, which I remember had these horrible hard plastic headphones, like something you might find in the Soviet Union in 1959. Instead of studying I'd go in there and listen to Elvis Costello over and over until my ears hurt and my head couldn't take it anymore."

"When I was a little older I came across Spacemen 3. It was a time of my life that feels quite vivid now – before Supergrass and even before [pre-’Grass outfit] The Jennifers, so I was about 12 maybe. It’s that time when you’re crossing over from cheesy chart stuff: I think I’d bought a Huey Lewis & The News single just a few years before because of Back To The Future and my brother had Rock Me Amadeus by Falco; that end of the 80s when things were pretty ropey. So Playing With Fire was a huge album for me. It was very intense and drawn-out, there were no three-minute pop songs, and it didn’t play by the rules. I just thought, and still do think, it was such a cool record."