"My Father introduced me to this, he was very passionate about culture, literature and music, especially jazz and classical music and he would take me to see it. I lived in L.A. and on the long drives home he’d put on whatever music he was interested in at the time and was always really passionate about it. “I was a classical and jazz nerd when I was a kid, that’s what was around me and what I was learning about. My older brother started learning the guitar when I was about ten and I started then too, I got really serious about it and he sort of stopped. “I’m of a generation where we really listened to records as records, I’d go extremely deep with symphonies and jazz records and this one was really major. It’s a piece of music that’s stuck with me since I was fourteen years old, it’s the harmonic sensibility in it, the drama and the way it paints this very intense, almost kind of landscape picture. There’s a mid-20th Century sense of harmony to it that’s stuck with me and I’ve continued revisiting it and referencing it in my mind as an example of really rich, really emotive writing, without any words whatsoever. “It was my first experience of a deeply technical piece of music that was deeply emotional and accessed your emotional brain in a really intense and overwhelming way. That’s always been the goal, not to make music that’s cerebral, but to use your technical ability to channel something that hits your emotional brain and takes your entire brain over in almost a trance-like experience. “This was the first piece of music that I heard that had that level of complexity, but it was still as affecting as a Beatles record."

"""It was a more intense injection of it. That was the second solo album, before the second Wu Tang album, and you can still hear that hunger in RZA's production. It's even more intense and claustrophobic. I didn't buy this album until six years after I discovered the Wu Tang, and it threw me again, I was obsessed with it. I used to have it on in the car all the time and I would stop it and go back to a little bit, then stop it and go back to another little bit, thinking about how I could replicate that, because it was so good. This was well after I came up with Sleaford Mods, just before I met Andrew. It was still so mind blowing. There was a theme to it, they always used to bang on about how it was a concept but I never got that. 'Guillotine' was my favourite one off it, and also 'Incarcerated Scarfaces'. The first one has this Keystone Cop kind of beat. It's bizarre, there's almost an Irish thing to that. It was east coast, you've got a lot of Irish immigrants there, so it must have spread through the culture. I used samples for the first four albums, or tried to, but I don't do it any more. It was just so tired to me, I'd rather leave sampling to those classic albums than flog a dead horse, you know. I was aware of the fact that it was an uphill battle trying to get clearance for stuff, but after three or four albums I was also getting bored of it, trying to find a loop off a great track. It didn't matter how obscure it was or how obscure the approach was, it just bored me and I needed something more home grown."""