"Old Rottenhat is an album that came out in 1985, and Works In Progress is an EP from the same time. They get grouped together on a compilation album called Mid-Eighties. On that album, he's using a lot more synthesiser, and a lot less acoustic and jazz instrumentation. I heard that when I was working at Domino where I used to work a few years ago, and it was just on in the office. I'd heard plenty of other Robert Wyatt but this was the stuff that I liked the most. I liked the combination of his very frail, beautiful voice mixed with properly 80s-sounding synthesisers. I like the claustrophobic sound, and the reverbs, and the synths. They're not nasty-sounding synths. For me, it's just very colourful-sounding music. I got to work with him more recently with Hot Chip, because we were such fans, and it was a real pleasure to be in the studio with him. He gave a lot of himself to the project, and came up with some amazing parts to add to our tracks. He would sing one song of mine, but he wouldn't sing another because he needed them to feel like something he had lived. I have to feel like stuff resonates with me. I liked his honesty, and what he bought to those recordings was amazing. There's a lot to learn from him - he's very political, and I'm not like that at all. And one of the things he was doing when he made Old Rottenhat was creating lyrics that nobody could misunderstand, in terms of political meaning. I was impressed by him not hiding anything, and that's something I like to do with my music in terms of the emotional content."

"It was was directed Max Ophuls and it stars Robert Ryan as a character who was intended to be based on Howard Hughes. Max Ophuls had been hired by Hughes’ production company, RKO, early to make the film that was actually supposed to be Faith Domergue’s big starring vehicle, and that movie just turned into a disaster. The production of it dragged along over five or six years with many different directors. After Ophuls got fired from it, he got hired to make an adaptation by another company of a novel called Wild Calendar. He told the screenwriter that he was paired with that he didn’t want to actually adapt the novel; he wanted to use the structure of the novel to make a film about how terrible he thought Howard Hughes was. They basically culled the notes of everything that they’d ever heard about Howard Hughes and Ophuls’ personal experiences, and the screenwriter, Arthur Laurents, went out and he met women who had had encounters with Hughes and then put it all together in this film which is about a shop girl who gets involved with a mysterious millionaire. The mysterious millionaire’s played by Robert Ryan, who was an actor who made a lot of different kinds of movies, and to a lot of film noir fans and B-Movie, genre film fans, he’s considered a great star, but he really looks like Howard Hughes in a lot of ways. They’re both very tall and lanky and have kind of a similar jaw. Even though Hughes knew this movie was being made – he insisted that he be sent dailies – he asked for some changes so that people wouldn’t think it’s him. The character and the performance are a lot like him. Nowadays, especially given everything we know about Howard Hughes, the similarities are impossible to ignore."