"I could have chosen any of the first three releases by Pixies – the Come On Pilgrim EP, Surfer Rosa or Doolittle. We bumped into Pixies when 'Sit Down' was number two in the charts. We were staying in the same hotel as them. I had seen them on TV and thought they were okay. I didn't get them totally but I thought they were pretty interesting. I went up to Black Francis at breakfast and introduced myself. We got talking for about half an hour and hit it off instantly. He invited me to a gig they were playing that night in London. I dragged two members of James, who had never heard of Pixies, to the show. We were up in the balcony chatting and not totally paying attention. I remember after about four songs, Saul [Davies] turning and saying, ""Have you been listening to this?"" He pushed us to the front of the balcony and we watched genius in front of our eyes. It was incredible – the arrangements, the vocals – Black Francis screams like no other singer – and beautiful subtlety within their post-punk songs. Pixies should have been as big as Nirvana, but never had a cute Kurt Cobain frontman. They were always one of the most ungainly-looking bands on the planet, but they made the most heavenly music as far as I was concerned. I love the surreal nature of the lyrics, that didn't quite make sense. I was a singer and I was all about making sense and communicating, and here was a band that seemed to do the opposite and the results were fantastic. That was quite revolutionary to me. Later, when we worked with Brian Eno on five albums, he would say to me ""stop making sense"" and I would think of the Talking Heads album of the same name, but I would also think of Pixies. With Pixies, not a large amount of people got them back then, as they were too ahead of their time. When Kurt Cobain said that in his perfect life he would have been born as the lead singer of Pixies, many people began to discover them. It meant that when they returned from their hiatus, they were bigger than they were previously as everyone had caught up to realise that Pixies were one of the most influential and important bands of all time. I got to know them a bit more and once went to see them play a tiny warm-up gig in London. I went backstage and was talking to Black Francis about screaming. I was asking how he did it, because when I tried, it wrecked my voice and I couldn't sing. He told me that a Puerto Rican man, who was a chef in a crappy restaurant in California, taught him how to scream. He then tried to teach me. At the time, he failed. I can scream a bit more now, but I think I was born more of a crooner."

"Before I dropped out to start the Pixies, I was in university in Massachusetts. [Future Pixies guitarist] Joey Santiago and I rented a house in the second year. I took the dark windowless room because it had a stereo and I would just sit in the dark and listen to Iggy Pop and XTC records for hours and hours. The one I listened to the most, though, was This Year's Model. They had it on cassette tape at the music library in college, which I remember had these horrible hard plastic headphones, like something you might find in the Soviet Union in 1959. Instead of studying I'd go in there and listen to Elvis Costello over and over until my ears hurt and my head couldn't take it anymore."

"Pixies are my favourite band, I've definitely listened to them more than any other band. It was hard to pick a song, I ended up just closing my eyes and pointing because I didn't really know which one to pick. With Pixies I feel there's just so much there; all the stopping and starting and the screaming and Kim Deal - Kim Deal's voice and Kim Deal's basslines - and all the weird timings, the freaky lyrics that don't make any sense and the loud and quietness of how they play. They've been a really huge inspiration to me. When I listen to Pixies I feel like music can be anything, it made me stop worrying what a song is gonna turn into. Before The Big Moon I always used to try and write songs and I never really got anywhere. I used to listen to music that was more polished and finished and I'd compare my music to that and just feel like ""Ugh! I'm never gonna be as good as them."" But Pixies sound so free and wild. They prove that music can go anywhere and if you feel like turning around and playing a different timing and completely different music suddenly, you can just do that. I love how surprising their music is. All four of them have their own brilliant thing going on: the drums are really cool and sometimes jazzy, Joey Santiago’s guitar lines are amazing, he's also got that ugly, gnarly guitar thing going on that I love – loads of bending, clashy notes. And Frank Black as well! No one screams like that. I think they're all amazing but I guess Kim Deal has a special place in my heart because there's just something about her, she's so fucking cool. Her voice doesn't sound like anyone else's, it's so pure and so smooth, she's a huge inspiration."

"When the Pixies were going, Joey and I got really into surf music. We would buy a lot of different tapes at truck stops. At some point we discovered Link Wray – that was pretty important. He wasn't an influence on us so much as a confirmation of what we already were: rough and loud and minimalist. With Link Wray it was like, Oh yeah, I totally get this. I am cut from the same cloth."

"I got a cassette from a cousin of mine that had The Offspring, Smash, on one side and Nirvana's Bleach on the other. That was definitely the wake-up call of rebellion and antagonism, but the first record I really got into from thereon was Surfer Rosa. It felt so alien but so familiar. It really clicked on a bone marrow level that felt like it had pre-existed for me. I bought Death To The Pixies at the same time on tape from HMV in Oxford and I just became obsessed with that record. I listened to it again recently and it reminded me particularly about how I could connect with Frank Black's lyrics despite not being aware of any real narrative when I was much younger. I don't think Foals would exist without the Pixies. I love the oddness and the strangeness of the Hispanic/punk/pop influence - it should be wrong, it shouldn't work but it does, really well. More recently I re-listened to his lyrics and appreciated how humorous they are, which reminded me that things don't need to be too obvious or narrative-based, they can be just fragments of thought. It opened the gateway into everything that then consumed me for the next ten years (Oxes, Albini, Sonic Youth, Godspeed - the American guitar alt/post-hardcore/post-rock world). Without Surfer Rosa I may have stayed with Nirvana and The Offspring…"

"I like a lot of Lou Reed’s records but before I got into him, I heard this record in my college dorm, courtesy of [Pixies guitarist] Joey Santiago. I knew that I liked the record but when I got into listening to it again, some years ago, I realised: I know the record really well. I really like the production and sound of it. It’s very toppy and it’s got some really good sounds. It’s very thin, 70s rock radio production. I’ve never really met Lou. I mean, I’ve been in the room with him on a number of occasions on tour and hanging out in the same breakfast rooms, but they’re situations when you don’t want to bother someone. I don’t remember the Quietus interview where the guy compared me to Lou Reed, but right now if someone wanted to mention me and Lou Reed in the same breath, it’d be a huge compliment. He’s obviously one of my rock & roll heroes."