"The first time I can remember hearing a synthesiser was sometime in the late '70s. I must have been eight or nine and I was on a driving holiday with my parents in the Pyrenees. 'I Feel Love' was on the radio and it freaked me right out. It scared me; that sequence flipped me out. 2000AD had just launched and I was really, deeply into it. All the stories were about terrifying dystopias and that song coming out of the radio sounded like a herald for one of those places. Years later, Silver Apples pushed similar buttons for me. They came about when synthesisers were more readily associated with almost academic music – people like Pierre Henry, Morton Subotnick, musique concrète stuff. Silver Apples created a sound I'd never heard before. The closest comparison (with a bit of hindsight) is something like NEU! – that driven, motorik sound. Silver Apples were before the first NEU! record by a few years. They sounded futuristic in name and sound; they built their own gear and credited the synth as a member of the band (The Simeon). There's a real toughness to the music, something very street."

"This reminds me of recording at Sawmills Studios at Fowey in Cornwall. It was a really beautiful environment and, thanks to the estuary, you had to come over by boat, loading the gear on depending on whether the tide was in. Then once you arrived it was this cut-off, really beautiful house. It felt like a holiday camp. Those first days in the studio were so exciting, we almost couldn’t contain ourselves. We were desperate to get in and start setting stuff up. We’d done a lot of four-track demos in the living room of the cottages so we kind of knew what we were doing but it was a very free time. I remember Danny and I being in the main living area there and getting really hooked on Either/Or. I think it was his almost Beatles-like sensibility in terms of his melodies and song structure. The technical side of things always interests me and I saw him doing similar things: finding a way to play four chords in a slightly odd way. His stuff wouldn’t always land on the chord that you expect, which was cool and very inspiring."