"These guys are a Brazilian 60s band, who people in their home country think of as their Beatles, but they're actually their own, weird, indescribable entity. The band is two brothers and a lady named Rita Lee. More than anything with this record, if you listen to it, you instantly want to live in Brazil – and you know a record is good if it makes you want to emigrate. It really conjures up a world. It's so imaginative and fun, it's part of that group of 60s records like Sgt Pepper's. They were 17 when they were making this record but they were already master songwriters with a massive skill and technique beyond almost everyone who is around right now. Just like The Beatles, they are able to be haphazard with it – they are so good they can have comedy skits in the middle of their songs: the coolest chorus with sound of breaking plates at the end of it. Apparently they were inventing machines while they were making it. They were putting their guitars through sewing machines. So the pulsing tremolo tone through one of the songs is the contact of the needle with the machine. Effectively they made a guitar pedal out of a sewing machine! It's super playful and Brazilian in character, but also perfectly fused with the international psychedelic revolution but it comes off as this other animal. It's the coolest thing when cultures get mixed together, it's so great to see that hybrid to happen. This band was important for me because when I was doing The Moldy Peaches because I was so inspired by how fun they were. My fantasy of what a show could be was them!"

"She takes that song 'Ain't Got No, I Got Life' and makes it so much more than a silly musical song [from Hair], she gives it emotional depth. That's the great thing about Nina Simone - she did so many Bee Gees songs - and the Bee Gees are this agreed-upon joke. I think the Bee Gees are amazing geniuses - they are just so prolific and the fact that they were able to make all these changes and keep going. They did this Beatles-esque psychedelic thing which I think is awesome and went onto becoming the kings of disco, and wrote that Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton song, 'Islands In The Stream'. Nina Simone hears a Bee Gees song or someone suggests it to her and she goes, ""That's such a sweet song - those guys have no soul at all, but I'm gonna make this song sound awesome."" What I love about that album is that it's mostly all recorded live - there's real space to it because of that. That's something we tried to do for the musical - record it live, we wanted to record it in the same room, but because there were so many elements we had to put in it was impossible. The album was recorded four days after Martin Luther King's death. I don't know how big Nina Simone really was in her lifetime, but it feels like we are lacking in politicised chanteuses right now. I think now [there's] this real era of Christian rock - people just want to be uplifted. It's kind of that dynamic thing that the critic criticises Cat Stevens for; you can probably criticise Coldplay or Mumford & Sons for the same kind of thing. Like, ""Oh you're just toying with me, you're starting all small and then making it huge, of course I have a religious feeling right now!""