"It was such a turning point, this album. I remember putting it on the Dansette and 'Purple Haze' coming on, and those opening notes, and going bloody hell I want this. When you hear something that really works for you it's almost not a conscious decision. It's a chemical reaction that your ears and your soul have. I heard it and it was like being grabbed on the inside and told you're going to go with this. You like this, whether you want to or not. I've pretty much always had a copy of this album, and I don't think it does everything that Jimi Hendrix does best, but it does a lot of it. I think he was very smart because he never overdid the solos, certainly not on this album. They're all fairly short songs. And also seeing the cover, back then, it was like wow, here's this black bloke, and he's dressed as a hippy. That was quite a shocking image for then, and you knew it was going to be great, just by looking at it. But it had that terrible lettering on the cover and it said ""Smash Hits"" and you immediately went oh my god, because that was what you had every Christmas, those K-Tel Smash Hits records. You never expected a serious musician, let alone one who played like that, to have that kind of title."

"And their next movie, Raising Arizona, came out and had this insane soundtrack. That crazy Pete Seeger “Ode to Joy” on the banjo with whistling and yodeling and it was totally mad. And every joke on it landed for me — one of the things about the Coens is there’s history in every shot. Some people say “Where do you want to put the camera?” but in the morning, they’ll draw up signs and give the actors with the lines and below a drawing from the storyboard of the camera angle they’ll be in when they have those lines. They have it all cut in their head when they do it. This is why they have control. Economy is the essence of art you know. I was looking at the detail in Raising Arizona and I thought, “We must have seen all the same films growing up because it was just speaking to me.” And it got to the part where John Goodman and his cohort come out of the ground and go into the service station to comb their hair and in the mirror you can see in spray paint OPE POE backward in the mirror. And I thought, “Really interesting this is how detailed they are.” They would take a quote from Dr. Strangelove like “Purity of essence, peace on earth” and put it backwards on a mirror and spray paint it on the wall somewhere backwards in Arizona."

"This is pretty amazing. I think this is Geoff Emerick’s first go as engineer. He’d been working there [at Abbey Road studios] but he hadn’t become an engineer yet. When I was working with Paul McCartney on his album, Flaming Pie, Geoff was the engineer as well. He told me what a marvellous thing it was for him because he used this close mic ambience on this album and did some really amazing effects, like on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Backwards stuff and all that and this was pretty advanced stuff in them days. It was more experimental than anything they’d done before. Some of the tunes on there are just great and it was them nearly getting into Sgt Pepper, you know? Probably doing more experimenting and copying tapes and bouncing them across. They hadn’t got the tracks to do it, really, so they had to use two machines and sometime three machines and then mix everything down from four tracks onto one and then start on another and mix that down to another machine. So it was very difficult to make those records, I would imagine. How did it sound back in ’66? Way better than everything else, I would say. It stood out like a sore thumb really. It was so tight and beautiful and punchy. It was the punchiest thing around. It was, like, powerful and, it seemed to me, majestic."