"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."

"I didn’t come into that record until about two years after it was made - I think I was about 34 and my wife and I were having kids and I was going back to school. In the late nineties rock music was kind of awful and you really had to search, there were a few bands out there doing different stuff but it was kind of an awful time for rock music, so I think I chose the right time to go back to school and have kids. Anyway, it took me two years but someone finally switched me onto the record and it blew my mind. Then I found out the band had split up - I went to see The (International) Noise conspiracy but it wasn’t Refused, so I thought really I missed my chance to see that band ever. But I finally got to see the band a few weeks ago in Seattle. There are gigs you go to on your own, ‘cos it’s not a social event, you don’t want to talk to anybody you just want to go and do your thing and it was really one of those moments where the gig was better than the record. That gig fortified everything I love about that record, that’s probably a top five record for me. Actually that record influenced a lot of the first Velvet Revolver record, we would listen to that band a ton"

"It was 1991/2 when the Spin Doctors had their relatively brief moment of huge fame, and their first album went triple platinum. I actually first saw them on The David Letterman Show in the early days of that, and was intrigued by the bouncy, very New York, educated and musicianly sound of the band, who were clearly great players. They were very much a product of that era when very good, very musically aware, very elegant musicians got together to make very direct rock music in a way that sounded so fresh and unlike the other stuff that was going on. They were musos, not a bunch of kids in a garage. They were guys who really knew about time signatures, rhythms and arrangements and had great ability with their instruments. And the singer, Chris Barron, brought a freshness in delivery that worked extremely well on The David Letterman Show and in the few videos they did at the time. I actually went to see them live in the UK and I met them, at the Wolverhampton Civic Hall or somewhere. The guitar player was a very charming guy, a bit of a fan and very pleased I came to the gig and went backstage to say hi, whereas the bass player and drummer gave me the cold shoulder, as if I was from a previous generation, like an earlier episode of Star Trek. For basically a three-piece with a singer they made a very cohesive noise."

"Growing up in America in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s every Sunday evening there was The Walt Disney Hour on TV and before they played whatever Walt Disney movie or animation that was on, they would always begin with ‘When You Wish Upon a Star.’ This was probably the first embedding of music into your DNA outside of something that your parents might listen to on the radio, this was something that was wholly your own, because this was children’s music. “Your parents would plop you down in front of the television set on a Sunday night and this was your hour of music basically, so for myself, Grasshopper and a number of other people this otherworldly song was really the first music that informed you. Whatever music was to come in your life, this was the first information that was literally downloaded into your bloodstream. “Early on in Mercury Rev we were using feedback and Grasshopper was using guitar elements, because we’d yet to learn how to score orchestrally ourselves, we were just too young. Yerself is Steam was our early attempt at orchestrating but we were using feedback and noise and basically any note we could grab on the fretboard or the piano, because we weren’t really accomplished rock musicians. Like everyone, when you begin you sort of fumble around. “The idea of the layering and the dynamics that are in some of those very early Disney movies, such as Fantasia or Pinocchio was definitely in our consciousness. It was definitely one of the few things we could lean on as teenagers."

"I had been keeping my eye on Sufjan Stevens for a while. He's always been surprising me and blowing me away. His song 'John Wayne Gacy, Jr.' has one of the best lyrics I have ever heard. On Carrie & Lowell he made an album that has no standout tracks – everything is just remarkable. Sufjan is a maverick and this album is a delicate, fragile piece about the death of his mother who had problems with schizophrenia and alcoholism. The lyrics are beautiful and he sprinkles in some almost Simon & Garfunkel-style harmonies to these folk songs, while others have an almost Sigur Rós element as well. I took my ten-year-old son to see him play. My son had pretty sophisticated tastes. We sat there, holding hands and weeping at the concert. Sufjan drew an incredible performance from that record that was so full of life and death. Sufjan didn't talk for an hour-and-a-half at that gig. It was like watching a sacred ceremony. The lighting and the visuals were the most profound I have ever seen in any concert. Then, after 90 minutes, he talked solidly for ten minutes. He was geeky, gawky and funny. I thought this must have been a pre-prepared speech. He had us belly-laughing. Then, he went back to the ceremony and it was such a bizarre contrast between this vulnerable boy during his talk, to this shaman performing in stillness. The only other rock musician I think can perform in stillness, to that level of profundity, is Leonard Cohen. I went to see that show three times and it changed every night. His talk changed every night, so it wasn't a prepared speech. He would end the show, after playing these beautiful folk songs, with about 15 minutes of noise, worthy of Sigur Rós and a lighting effect, which I can only describe as what I think the soul will look like when I die. It left me shaking and sobbing. It was one of the top five gigs I have ever seen – and I have seen the greats. Sufjan can get you on all levels. I think he will be seen as one of the greats of this generation."

"At the end of 1980, Glenn Branca had a tour booked so I quit my day job to go on it, so on the one level it was kind of this fulfillment – ‘wow I’m actually going to go on a fucking rock & roll tour, how great is this?’ And I think it was the end of me having day jobs in New York, which was kind of also an amazing thing to think about. The first tour was in the US and it was wrapped up in all this kind of weird stuff. We were on the West Coast when Lennon was shot. He was one of my great early heroes and one of the reasons why I was involved in any of this stuff to begin with, and he gets shot while I’m on my first rock & roll tour. It felt kind of heavy in a certain way. A few months later we went to Europe and when we played Berlin, Neubauten was the opening act and it was their second ever gig. So I got to see them at the very beginning and meet all those guys. Sheet metal music on cymbal stands - they were really just putting it together at that point, their music also progressed really fast in the early period, but this was just an early primitive version of what they were doing. I met all of those guys, Mufti and Blixa and Alexander and Alex and I some German relatives so I had an affinity with Germany to begin with, and we became friends right away, so I’ve known them since the early 80s, when they really started doing their thing it was this parallel rise to what Sonic Youth was doing. We came out of New York, out of the stuff that was coming out of New York and Black Flag and Minutemen the West Coast stuff, but at the same time all this stuff that was going on in England – the Birthday Party, was there at that point and we had met them, and in that same early period Lydia Lunch had taken us to one of the last Birthday Party shows in New York and we met Nick, Rowland (S. Howard), Mick Harvey and all those guys. Shortly after that when Sonic Youth first started coming to England, the Bad Seeds wanted Sonic Youth to be their opening act. Those early Neubauten records were just so impressive in what they were doing because again Blixa comes out of all this Germanic Berthold Brecht art music as well as this extreme stuff, and they took their extremism to welding torches and grinders on stage. It’s all music on a certain level, didn’t John Cage teach us that, or Stockhausen or Varèse? What Neubauten was doing was really coming out of this same climate of ‘we’ve got electric guitars on stage but we’ve also got noise-makers that could tie our music back to futurist music of the 20s’. I think the really dominant thing about all these groups from that period was that these were no longer kids that grew up in middle America that heard rock & roll and put a band together in their garage after high school and just went out and did their thing, these were all people that were arts educated and went to university and were steeped into 20th century art making practice whether it was music, or visual art or experimental theatre. For me I grew up with pop music on the radio in the kitchen of my house every morning before school, there was an AM radio blasting the latest 7” singles, you couldn’t get away from it, but at the same time I got educated in all this other stuff so all these people wanted to combine this stuff, they didn’t want to leave their education behind and pretend they were ruffians in the garage that were uneducated and idiots savants – kind of like the Stooges were a real version of that, although I couldn’t say enough about Iggy and his smartness. When Neubauten was doing that stuff it wasn’t tongue in cheek but it was marshalling a lot of different influences, not just simple pop influences. This is some of the most remarkable music ever, and the shows they put on, they were dangerous in an extreme way with sparks flying off the stage. Sonic Youth played this famous show in the Mojave Desert in 1984, and Neubauten did one in the same series, within 4 or 5 months of our show. We had a lot of early symbiotic relationships with all those groups."