"When I was about ten, I was given The Compact King Crimson on cassette tape and that’s what led me to “21st Century Schizoid Man.” This song is from In the Court of the Crimson King, which has the screaming face on the cover, and the face is inspired by the Arthur Janov book The Primal Scream. Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis. “My Dad told me that at the time of the book and album there was a real fad for going out into nature and screaming guttural sounds. It became this zeitgeist self-help technique and I believe that’s what influenced the book, but essentially, it’s a guy having an existential meltdown and the song taps into that. “I think because I was young when I heard it, I didn’t appreciate this more complex meaning, and at the time I just appreciated the sheer aggression of the music. It was also the first time I’d ever heard those complicated time signatures and polyrhythms, as well as the combination of distorted guitar and saxophone. ""I hadn’t grown up on jazz, so I sort of thought it was for nerds, but when I heard this and heard the sax on the time signatures I was like ‘This is like jazz rock’. In the Court of the Crimson King is hailed by lots of people - like Shellac - as the first Math Rock or Post Rock record. They also invented heavy metal if you think about it, because they were doing riffs before Black Sabbath. “Our first album, Making Dens, is heavily indebted to King Crimson. We very much wore our influences on our sleeve in the beginning, and we had this approach of throwing everything including the kitchen sink at our songwriting. Whenever I listen to Making Dens, I hear the chaos of a band trying to sound like King Crimson. They’ve been a big influence for Mystery Jets."

"I always say that T. Rex were my band when I was a kid. What I mean by that is so much of my identity was about being a T. Rex fan. A bit like choosing your colours as to which football team you would support, when I was nine or ten I found T. Rex. I was obsessed with Bolan. At that point, coincidentally, they were about to hit their stride as a commercial and artistic force. They had released Electric Warrior and they were on the precipice of being the most important band around. The Slider came out and it had 'Metal Guru' on it. It was a song that changed my life as I had never heard anything so beautiful and so strange, but yet so catchy. 'Telegram Sam' was also on that album and the whole thing was unusually spooky and had a weird atmosphere, considering it was a number one record and they were essentially a teenybop band. It's another one of those records that what you get on the cover is what you get inside. I was a teenybopper at the time. I was ten, eleven, buying lots of records and loving the pop music I heard on the radio. I consider myself very lucky that what was on the radio at the time and the music being made for very young children happened to have some substance to it. T. Rex was pure pop, but it was coming from someone who had had a go at being a hippy and being a mod. The album was very much of its time, and had a sexuality to it that I didn't understand at that age. There is an aspect of the sound that Tony Visconti must have had a large part in, and Flo [Mark Volman] and Eddie [Howard Kaylan] from The Turtles on backing vocals added this odd, druggy spook to the whole thing."

"This record was 1958 and it was already a 25-year retrospective so that means it spans from 1932/3 to 1958! It came to me at the same time as all this new wave stuff and I was really interested in all the stuff Cage was doing with prepared piano, and there’s a bunch of prepared piano on my new record. Between those pieces and orchestral works for multiple players where Cage was using people banging on metal break drums and stuff, it was really sounding like the gamelan music I was listening to at the same time and I just found it to be super inventive. John Cage was defining a new way of thinking about music in the 20th century and in a way his definition included all of noise and all of ambient sound and all of these things that became movements for us in the 20th century, like Eno’s whole discreet music and ambient thing; or noise music from extreme harsh Japanese noise to whatever we called Neubaten or what Sonic Youth were doing, if you called that noise music; or the Boredoms or Merzbow which is more extreme, there’s no singing, there’s no guitars, it’s just harsh noise – this music opened the door for all that stuff. It’s amazing music in it’s own right, and yet some of it also explores really low volume like super quiet aspects of music where background sounds and people coughing – well that’s part of what you’re hearing in the experience too. So I felt like that record is so important that it defined a gargantuan giant of the 20th Century, which is John Cage, but it defined all these different bits of music that even if people later didn’t realise their music stemmed from that, in some way it did. Everything from 60s onwards, no matter what you were doing outside of rock & roll there was some kind of influence from Cage there."