"I remember buying the tape of this song. I must have killed that tape, I rewound it and rewound it. I think that was my first recognition of realising that I was in love with pop music and how it’s so addictive and how it made me feel. Even now, if I hear those opening bass notes I’m like ‘Fuck! It’s so good!’ It hit such a chord inside. “I think with ‘Without You’ and ‘It’s All Coming Back To Me Now’ they were me experiencing just the songs, but this was like ‘Oh my god, I love Britney’, I became obsessed with her as a pop star. The song definitely has the power of attraction and falling in love, being able to repeat, repeat, repeat and it’s such a good melody, but also Britney was an icon from day one. I felt like I just wanted to be like her. “I would watch the music video over and over on TV and that’s when I fell in love with pop music as a thing. I didn’t even know what it was, but I knew I wanted to be part of it. I liked the simple production back then too, it was so non-aggressive. I find a lot of the production in pop so aggressive now, whereas Britney was just so fucking pure, it was easy on the ears and I wanted to hear it over and over. “Britney takes me right back, like I can feel, I can see, I’m in the back of my mum’s car, I’m looking at the tape player, hitting rewind. I can see that and I’m like a zombie. I’m here going… [tape rewind sounds]. If someone puts on '...Baby One More Time' I’m ‘Oh god, turn it up! I have the same love for it each time, it’s amazing."

"I cover this song quite a lot—I’m really into dumb, hook-y choruses. That’s my favorite thing about pop music, when a song is so dumb that it’s clever; ’I Want Candy’ is a perfect example of that. I also love the singer Annabella Lwin, how she was 15 years old and punk as fuck. I listen to this song before I go on stage, and it always makes me feel free"

"This one is stupid but it’s not. Those [directors], man. What [they] did with color, it’s almost like color didn’t exist before [that]. Color was around a couple years, but that darn movie made it pop. They dance with it. They danced with sound, danced with music, danced with the metaphors of the theme of the movie. I like when it all comes together, and they did a great job with that. Magical."

"From the 90s onwards French music started to become very interesting. There have been quite a few French artists, especially in the dance-pop arena, who have found their metier when a lot of earlier French music just didn't translate. We lived in Belgium for quite a long time and one of the things I was completely aware of was the fact that as a British person I knew nothing about French music. And that's one good thing that's happened in music over the last twenty years: the increased internationalisation of music. Yes, Sebastian Tellier has to sing in English, but it doesn't necessarily matter as you don't understand what he's singing about anyway. He kind of does it by stealth. People told me about Sebastian Tellier and I was like, "yeah, it sounds quite interesting." And then you hear it, and you hear it again, and eventually you're like "my god, this is brilliant!" It's a combination of music and voice, it's groovy and funky; it's just incredibly listenable and a little bit bonkers. Again this is one of those records that we've listened to a lot. You can just put it on and it's just there, and sometimes it's just so beautiful, what he does. I'm not afraid of things that are just beautiful."