"I first heard it when I was a little kid. I thought, ""What is this?"", trying to get my head around it. You've got to do a dance as a little kid to figure it out, and with all the most interesting stuff it takes you a while to get it. It's so fucking modern. You could pick a number of songs, but the architecture of those songs, it's like these super-tight rhythm sections and it doesn't really go anywhere. The groove is the thing. Sometimes he goes, ""Take it to the bridge!"" and they change it, but then they go back to the groove. It's not like a traditional song structure. The streamlined simplicity of it, and not being distracted by harmonic development, strikes me as being so revolutionary and modern. It makes me think of painting. Sometimes he's just groaning and yelping, and he's kind of like Jackson Pollock over this very tight structure, this kind of animalistic thing smeared across the song. You can see the connection to the blues, you can see the connection to early jazz, but he takes it somewhere else completely different."

"When I first appeared, after I did this EP in 1982 with Robert Wyatt [Summer Into Winter], I got a feature in the Melody Maker. The headline was something-or-other "in a blue afternoon". I was likened to him, but had never heard him – I was just a teenager when I made it, after all – and it took my years to find the actual album. It took years to find anything back then. Also, it'd been out of print for years, but eventually I found it, and still love it. 

It's only been since I've got older that I've thought about the roots of that culture, about these men like Fred Neil, Tim Hardin and Tim Buckley who grew up in that New York 1960s culture clash between jazz, folk and the blues, playing supperclubs, smoking weed. This is the first album Buckley produced himself, and it sounds like it. It's got the sense of someone reaching for something beyond his capabilities at that point. It doesn't always work, it's not always perfect, but it's all about human ambition, in its feel and it execution. I love that. All the best albums have that.
"