"Greg Sage had a lot of great records right around this period but this one to me is the peak. It's extremely dark music and it's sort of hardcore but it's also undeniable pop songs. I remember driving around Austin with some of my hardcore friends from Temple and they were really into The Misfits, The Dead Kennedys. They weren't into my silly pop music, let me just put it that way. They were not Julian Cope fans. They put this record on they were like 'this is too gloomy. It's creeping me out.' It's a record that has classic song after classic song. At one point I covered 'No One Wants an Alien' just on my four track. I used to cover songs a lot just as an exercise because it was fun and to figure out how songs were put together. It was my process for figuring out how to become a recording artist. "

"I think everyone has a complicated relationship with Michael Jackson, but if you listen back to his stuff it’s insanely unique. Nothing sounds like it, people might have a similar voice, but in terms of the kind of music, it’s very particular. It’s the first record I remember singing along with. I remember having a seven inch of ‘Another Part Of Me’ which had an instrumental on the other side and I realised it was just a karaoke opportunity. It was a huge pop record from when I was young, and very influential in a way; the same way that The Beatles teach you about music, Michael Jackson was like the first pop person I was aware of, and Kylie Minogue in our house was the female equivalent. An insanely successful guy who isn’t a macho guy, but is captivating in some way. Then you’ve got the ‘pinnacle’ of Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson together!"

"An almost perfect album. Apart from one mistake – there's a joke song on it. I think jokes should never be on records, they just don't last. The record is such an incredibly serious record, it's one of the most grown-up records ever made in that the things she's talking about and thinking about are such serious and complicated emotional situations. It's one of the only records where I actually care about the lyrics. I really listen to the lyrics and think about what she's trying to say. I've always said that country music is grown-up and she came more out of country than out of pop. Whereas pop is always about the problems of adolescence really, hooking up with someone and whether she really likes you or not, when you get to country music it's about mortgages and divorce and things like that [laughs]. It seems to me to be about real-life, grown-up issues and so seems much more interesting to me lyrically."

"If you want to think about Roxy Music as a real force, you have to really understand just how unusual it was for a band to be as self-referential in the early 70s. Pop music had never done that before. It wasn't taking references from the 50s and the 60s and pulling them apart, or taking high fashion and lampooning it, and being - in quotes - 'ironic'. We are so used to everybody grabbing their influences from 60 years of pop culture nowadays that it is no big deal. Back then, when Roxy Music first came out it was like trying to get your head around a human collage. I was a teenager and didn't really understand that nuance, but I knew that something was happening and that it was very clever. But, that all doesn't really mean very much unless the songs sound great and Roxy's records sounded really great. I am glad that bands had such a strong concept around the business of making singles and Roxy Music took it very seriously. It shows how great a single can be in that you can take all of that conceptual stuff and try and cram it into a three-and-a-half minute song. That is an amazing thing. That's why I picked the collection of singles. The Roxy albums are great in their own right, but when you have everything that was going on with Roxy Music in a collection of sharp singles, all next to each other on an album, I will go with that album every time. I try to make all my solo albums sound like greatest hits albums. Roxy Music managed to be slightly weird and not obvious, but really entertaining and intriguing and catchy at the same time. That is a very, very powerful combination."

"The Horrors were recently on the tour bus discussing which is our favourite Iggy Pop song. It didn’t even have to be an Iggy song, just a song that he was involved in. My mind went instantly to The Stooges, who are one of the all-time great bands. The Horrors played Rock The House Festival with The Stooges years ago, back in 2007. I was only 21 years old and I got to interview Iggy Pop for NME. I loved The Stooges and talked about them with Iggy Pop for the whole interview. Looking back on it I would have wanted to talk to him about his solo records, because The Idiot is just a brilliant piece of music and interesting in that it’s kind of an early incarnation of industrial music. 'Mass Production’ is so warped, the synth at the end comes in perfectly out of tune – it just sounds brilliant. The first time I heard it I was going through the Bowie in Berlin book shortly after I interviewed Iggy Pop. I’d listened to The Stooges loads, MC5 were one of my favourite bands as a kid and I was looking for something that had this sort of factory made heaviness to it. The song is so dystopian, and dystopian music is definitely something The Horrors do. Most of the songs coming out around that time were emotion led, but ‘Mass Production’ is bleaker. It’s the kind of song you’d listen to at the end of the night when things start to go a bit south. In just one song it sounds like a full body of work and I still listen to it frequently now. Although The Idiot isn’t necessarily representative of Iggy Pop’s work, it does feel just like him to me. If I was to pick something representative of Iggy Pop then I would probably choose the Stooges’ song ‘I’m Sick of You’. In some ways maybe ‘Mass Production’ is more of a Bowie expression, but they clearly built up an amazing rapport and these two creatives made something that perhaps they couldn’t have made on their own and that makes it unique. It feels like a once in a lifetime pairing. I just think Iggy Pop is one of the greatest of all time. He’s an all-time icon of music and expression. And he’s also a great guy, you can get that just by listening to his radio show. People always say things like ‘Don’t meet your heroes’ or whatever, but I don’t need the musicians I respect to be nice people or people I can be friends with. It just so happened that Iggy Pop was a kind guy. And that made it really enjoyable."

"I saw it when I was seven and it has stayed with me probably more than I’m aware of. I loved the Beatles and owned a bootleg single of “All My Loving,” so when the film came to my local cinema in Warsaw—called Moskwa (Moscow)—I queued up for half a day and got in. The film didn’t make much sense story-wise, but it was a mind-blowing experience. I remember it so vividly—the energy, the jokes, the crisp black-and-white shots, and above all the music. It’s a film that is carried by music, which was something new for me at the time. Was it the first music video? I think that British pop was responsible for some of the most inventive British films (OK, Richard Lester was American, but it’s still a very British film)."