"The reason I’ve chosen the Donna Summer album is not truly because it is a record I’ve played a lot. There is one song on it that changed my career. It’s a song that changed a lot of people’s perceptions of music and it’s, obviously, ‘I Feel Love’. I remember when I first heard ‘I Feel Love’, it sounded alien. I hadn’t heard anything like that before. There wasn’t anything like that before. Somebody had the forethought and the invention to actually come up with something with electronic sequencing that people could dance to. It pulsated in a different way. That person was Giorgio Moroder. I am very grateful to Giorgio Moroder for inventing this way of thinking and for the other records he’s made. I think he is a terrific talent and I loved the work he did on a lot of movie soundtracks, particularly Midnight Express and Cat People. I have all his work. ‘I Feel Love’ was visionary – that’s all I can say about it. The song, along with The Sparks’ album Moroder did [No. 1 In Heaven], was the sort of sound I wanted to make. I was just learning electronic music and how to sequence things. Without a doubt, between Moroder and Kraftwerk, those were the people leading the way – that paved the streets for me. Without ‘I Feel Love’ there wouldn’t be a lot of electronic dance music. That’s the DNA we all used. Moroder, for me, had a period where he was defining the future and it was very unnoticed by a lot of people, perhaps because he was more of a producer than a writer of a lot of songs. As for I Remember Yesterday, it’s a funny album as half of it is electronic and brilliant and the other half is very traditional and is okay. It’s a strange balance but a very important album because of that track."

"We always recommend it to our students. We both teach high school classes a lot, and most of them aren’t aware of this movie, even though it’s the most honest and accurate depiction of that age. I guess they’re early high school or middle school, they’re about fourteen or fifteen. There’s almost a documentary feel to it. At the time, the [kids] weren’t professional actors, though a lot of them have gone on to acting. [Director] Peter Sollett did such a beautiful job. It’s so loose and warm and real and naturalistic and funny and unexpected. So much of it wasn’t rehearsed, and they let a lot of that process unfold while they made the movie. The kids sort of do their own dialogue. But I remember seeing it and thinking, “I’ve never seen it done that well before.” Usually I think teenagers are overwritten, written by much older people. Sort of reinventing."

"My mom used to play this and it's funny because recently she told me that she didn't even like it very much. But I liked it a lot. It's not like this is the definitive girl group compilation, it's just that I grew up with it. And it means something to me, I guess, because I've covered two of the songs [Dionne Warwick's 'Don't Make Me Over' and Barbara Lewis' 'Hello Stranger']. I probably didn't realise just how important it was to me back then, but the songs have stuck to me over time and so I've come to understand its importance. All these playful and soulful performances, they're still very inspiring to me even though I was five or six when I was listening to it a lot. There wasn't a lot of music my parents played that I enjoyed at that age, so it's in there pretty deep. It's very 1950s, very glittery, very Phil Spector-y. It was pretty formative."