"He's the best frontman of all time. Iggy Pop and Nick Cave are up there for me in different ways, but Nick Cave didn't invent the stage dive. I could have picked any Stooges, but Raw Power has everything. I picked this mainly because of my love for Iggy Pop. When Post Pop Depression came out last year I fell in love with it, a collaboration between two of my favourite artists [Pop and Josh Homme], and to see this man play the Royal Albert Hall and stage diving is pretty fucking next level. It was a monumental moment. I was quite young when I first heard The Stooges. I had a couple of weird mixtapes my uncle had made. He was into stuff like The Specials but there were a few random tracks on there and the Stooges were one of them. Now, any time I have to DJ I mainly just play Iggy. He's got so many classic songs that you don't have to think about it, you can just turn to him first, a decent 40 minutes of Iggy Pop, then fill it out with whatever else you need to put in. Iggy's hits are a bit stretched out over his entire career, but Raw Power's got my favourite lyrics he's ever written. It's got the song 'Raw Power' which is just next fucking level and it's got 'Search and Destroy'. ""I'm a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm"". If you want to sum up how a man feels walking down a Hollywood street feeling like a badass, it doesn't get any better than that. The name of the album says everything you need to, it's where I took inspiration from when I was trying to come up with Modern Ruin."

"I chose a live album because you can hear where East meets West. It's obvious Ravi's known for his traditional music with Indian instruments. But with Inside The Kremlin he has the strings going. He's got a very orchestrated formality to mix in with his own Indian-tempered scale melodies. You can also hear the giant strings very clearly, so for me this is heaven. You've got the Indian modality mixed in with classical music. It's part of where we learned to orchestrate - where you can hear the sitars, for instance. It didn't take long for us to think, hey, this is how you put a cool guitar, strings or oboe piece together! Before that - and the same happened on Ocean Rain by Echo & The Bunnymen - it was the first time in a long time that we began to suss out this orchestration thing; it's not rocket science! I know the composers seem like they're physicists but if we can just take the melodies we can already play on the guitar and we put them on these classical instruments, that's orchestration, isn't it? We didn't have to be Mozart to do this. But in my case, this is where I began to figure some of these things out, certainly with Ocean Rain and Ravi Shankar. When I was in The Flaming Lips making the In A Priest Driven Ambulance album, it was very similar in that there was a guitar melody, but there were also strings doing it. That led to the beginnings of the orchestration in Mercury Rev as well as Flaming Lips. Listen to Ravi Shankar, and then listen to modern Bollywood - that's the Western or Hollywood side of Eastern music."