"The Cure was my favourite band. The Cure covered my walls, they were on the T-shirts I wore, Robert Smith was who I was going to marry when I grew up. At 15, that's how I defined myself. I owned all the B-sides and rarities and all the bootlegs and went to see them live whenever I could. I still look back at the Cure catalogue as one of my ultimate musical educators, especially because I feel like Robert Smith, as a songwriter, went on so many tangents and wrote so much weird shit. He was clearly a masterful pop songwriter, but he was coming up with stuff that was strange and experimental, and then stuff that was really dark and brooding, and then really funny and poppy. The Cure have this reputation as the glum, sad band, but I never experienced them that way. I experienced the music of the Cure as this adventure in songwriting. Boys Don't Cry was the first record I got, which was a great record to start with. But after that, The Top – what a weird record! Such a departure from the punky, poppy stuff. So I was totally hooked, and totally fascinated by Robert Smith as a person, by what was going on in his head. Any literary reference he made, I ran out and bought the book. I was obsessed."

"If you're listening to prog like Gong then you're going to bump into Magma. They make their own language on their records, so we made our own words for Magma albums. A number of Magma albums would pop up in various friends' record collection, and each one was quite different. On Üdü Wüdü there's an 18-minute track called 'De Futura', which is like a suite and it moves to different tempos and it's got all these cross rhythms in it; it's an overwhelmingly transcendent record. There was a rock disco that we used to go to in Manchester in the 70s and you could take your own records and we used to take this record. You'd see these rock fans freaking out to it. It was a curious time in Manchester because you had the punk thing, but all these other oddball things like Magma and Earth, Wind And Fire were standing beside each other. It wasn't as tribal as it's been made it out to be. You'd go up to a free festival in Rochdale that was called the Deeply Vale festival and all these subcultures would be represented there, because all of the sub-cultures would be big enough to stand on their own two feet. But at this disco in Manchester, you'd hear Bowie and Roxy Music, and Magma, probably some Genesis and some Sex Pistols."

"Oh Jesus, have you heard that album? I just recently found that. I think it was when I first got a Moog, and I read the history of it and I heard Jean-Jacques... he was one of the first ones to use it in a pop way. I read a book about him. I didn't know that Edith Piaf sponsored him to come over to the United States. He had this instrument - I saw it on YouTube - that really, at the time, just sounded like the violin and all these other things, and it was just incredible. Also, he did a version of 'Flight Of The Bumble Bee' and he recorded a hive of bumble bees and then went back to his laboratory and spliced them individually - amazing! He kind of looks like my dentist, he's such a nerd! Disneyland uses his version of 'Baroque Hoedown' for their Electric Parade. When he went to Disneyland to hear it he was like, "Wow", he was amazed! I think at one point Disneyland stopped using it and people were like, "What the hell?! What happened to that music?" So it came back. To me, that's part of the attraction, it's wacky, it fits in with all these lights and the kids love it and all that stuff."

"Similar time to The Human League obviously - it's just another synth-pop classic. It's when O.M.D. still had a much more experimental edge and yet similarly to the League, they had some stonking tunes, the two 'Joan Of Arc' ones, and 'Souvenir's on that as well, which I absolutely adore. I remember I bought the single of 'Souvenir' and probably the single record that I have played most in my life. I just kept it on repeat on our old record player in the house. That would have been in Enniskillen Woolworth's, probably along with Roland Rat or something - everybody buys shit records at the time as well and accidentally buys good ones when you're that young. I hold all of the above in mind when writing music and yet you're also trying to expunge them from your mind as well! It's a very complicated process - you can't help being the sum of your parts and you can't help little bits of the things you love coming out. If a certain chord does a certain thing in one of those songs that makes you kind of tingle, then you're looking for the tingle, but you're not looking to do it with the same chord, if you know what I mean! So you might use the same kind of mechanics but not the same notes."