"Joni's the greatest songwriter ever. And what a record. She writes as this omniscient narrator on this album, surveying everything from above, commenting on this world of women and predatory men she's created, and she has such power and agency as she does it. I've read about how music critics – male critics, let's be honest – struggled with this record at the time. Records like Blue, which touch on a woman's emotional struggles from a subjective standpoint, were so much easier and more comforting to them, I suppose. I love how she intimidated people, and didn't care. 
There's a great unreleased bootleg of demos of this album, called The Seeding Of Summer Lawns. Joni's got all these jazz cat musicians in, but she's written all these complicated flute and horn parts for them already, and sings them all, as they're all in her head. It's unbelievable. I can't speak highly enough of her, and of this."

"Lots of metal bands had all got a little bit in a rut by the time this came out. People were quite bothered about how they looked. And NIrvana smashed it to pieces. They said music should be raw and powerful – great guitar riffs, good lyrics, great melodies. Nirvana were the ones. And Kurt Cobain was charismatic. A lot of musicians resented grunge, but I quite liked it – we needed it. Saxon never went grunge – we went more metal again in the 90s. We had really needed a rest, but we couldn’t have one, and we weren’t firing on all cylinders. It wasn’t ‘til the 90s that we got our shit together again. Nirvana resonates for me because of that. It took people by surprise, because it went so big so quickly. There’s a lot of menace and darkness in and it was heavier than what other people were doing at the time."

"I'd loved the previous albums but then Attack & Release came out and they'd worked with Danger Mouse, who is one of my favourite producers and was doing great stuff around then with Gorillaz and Martina Topley-Bird, and he'd done The Grey Album thing too, and I think Gnarls Barkley came just after this. Quite an unusual choice of producer for them, because they'd been doing quite hard stuff before that. Not rock rock, but y'know. It was just an amazing blend. Danger Mouse has got a real swing to the stuff he does, and he'd put a surrounding swing to it, combining two quite raw musicians - and an amazing vocalist - and it's just this incredible album. I've seen them a couple of times - and I think I built my expectation of them up too much - I mean, they were amazing, but I think I was expecting it to be the pinnacle of all gigs."