"It's a huge, very personal, very absorbing rock record. I love it to bits. I heard them on John Peel, he was a big Codeine supporter… I think they were ahead of their time, because if you listen to them stylistically, it doesn't seem anything particularly different, because there's a lot of bands that make slow loud music, but this was incredible and unique. The songs are why they still maintain the interest. It was really moving seeing them at ATP I'll Be Your Mirror, and you can tell the band were quite touched as well. I was a big John Peel fan, and when we started the band it was an ambition to get played on John Peel, it was an ambition to get a Peel Session, so I think that it kind of went from being a fan to seeing him as some kind of way to let the world hear your music. It worked on different levels. Getting to meet him, he was a really wonderful person too. Even a lot of bands before my time, you'd get to hear them because they'd done Peel sessions, those grey 12". It was a seal of approval that the band were worth checking out because they'd got to do a Peel Session. I think he had a big influence on a lot of the bands up here because for a long time no-one really paid much attention to the music in Scotland apart from John Peel. If you got a session with him you got a few hundred pounds which could be used to play some gigs outside Scotland, so he almost acted as an arts fund for supporting Scottish musicians."

"I was a big fan of Mark Everett ever since I heard ‘Novocaine For The Soul’; I heard it once on the radio and bought the album the next day. It was perfect, almost like a Nirvana that were still alive. Little did I know that was their only song that was really like that, but I still fell in love with them, I loved Beautiful Freak. I guess I was following them so closely and thinking about his various woes so much and then this record came out. It was set in a hospital and a lot of things seemed to be set in a hospital for me, musically, at that time - The Bends had a lot of those themes on it too, for example. On the one hand there was this idea of the monotony of being in a hospital, the absolute depths of his misery, but at the same time he can’t seem to stop himself writing these theme tunes for happier scenes, like ‘Susan’s House’. He’s just got these terrible, heart-breaking lyrics but attached to these jovial little songs. There’s also loads of really cool sampling and the musique concrète stuff he does, particularly on Electro-Shock Blues, where there’s lots of ambience and you don’t know what instrument is playing what. It’s got a kitchen sink sort of vibe. “Arrangement-wise too you’ll get really unusual stuff happening; lots of bass and then something weird with no drums. He broke a lot of rules for me when I was starting out and I started thinking, 'Well, you don’t have to have that in your song if you don’t want...' You could just have the beeping from a heart monitor and sing over that."