"This album could be racked under 'sunshine pop' or 'pop psych'. My idea of what makes good psychedelic music isn't a fixed thing – it's about the feeling you get from a record. In direct relation to my work, I think psychedelia is about creating another reality. I work from pure imagination and records that create their own spaces are hugely appealing to me. The Aphrodite's Child album does that and this Sagittarius record does it too. They are records that really suck you into their own worlds. Present Tense takes you to paradise, it makes you want to jump into the speakers and fully experience the place that they've imagined for the listener. Growing up on the Beach Boys, I was familiar with the kind of sound on the record. It's very gentle, very orchestral, soft and lush; it offers a place to escape to from the real world. You can check in whenever you want to put the record on. In a way, the music we make as Seahawks tries to do the same thing – it's trying to conjure up a glorious utopia in a world that's clearly gone to shit!"

"I heard The Afghan Whigs real early on and I was like, ‘Alright, this is like soul music but it’s played by white guys from Cincinnati, and I don’t even know if they can play that well.’ They eventually could play really well, and they turned me on to this whole other way of thinking that showed me you could mix all these things together without ever crossing over into pop music, which I felt when I was younger was just not something that I related to. Crime Scene Part One was a huge song for me because it was like a movie. It was brooding and there was something spooky about it, and then when you find out what it’s about it’s really scary. From there I went straight into Tom Waits.”"

"It's a beautiful record. It's the Neu/Can supergroup in a way with Jaki from Can on drums and Michael on guitar. It's the pop end of Krautrock and sounds like Utopian sports montage music or something! It evokes the future, even still, for me or my idea of what the future would be at that time. It's a record I listened to a lot in recent years and just a record that I really recommend. I wouldn't have heard any of this stuff until the early-1990s but it was something we listened to a lot of as the Super Furry Animals. I quite like listening to instrumental music as it means I can still think over it without lyrics interfering; there's a time and a place for lyrics!
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"This was probably the most important pop album for me in that I think it's the moment where I realised that I could be a musician. It was partly that this band was semi-non-musicians, but it was also because the songs borrowed a lot from what I knew about experimental music at the time. I'd been playing experimental music with various outfits in England and with Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff and all these people that had come over from America to visit us, 32 people who were into the experimental music scene in England. La Monte Young was one of the big figures in everybody's cosmology at the time and The Velvets, both Lou [Reed] and John [Cale], had worked with La Monte. So the first album came out, I thought, ""Fantastic, amazing."" Second album I thought, ""Great, amazing."" But the third album was the one that really killed me. The first album was quite wild and dark and weird, the second album was mad and intense. But the third album was so gentle and beautiful, but because you knew their history there was that undertone of violence and rage, something trying to burst out. Even on the love songs on this – and many of them are love songs – you hear that real tension. What made me think I could do it too was that the songs were simple and the playing was so simple. There's very little artifice at all in this. But also the mood was something that I thought I could kind of connect to. The difficult thing about pop music as I was growing up, and I was 20, I think, when I first heard this, was that it dealt with young teenage emotions mostly, and that just wasn't interesting to me. I loved the music but what the songs were about was sort of childish and it was all about 'me' and 'you' and 'love', and I just wasn't interested in that really. At the same time I'd been working with Cornelius Cardew and all these kind of quite heavyweight experimental composers. But I didn't want just that. I wanted that [pop music] and that [experimental]. So I was always looking for anywhere that somebody was making some blends that started to be interesting. I didn't own this record for years and years. I just didn't buy this album because I never wanted it to become casual for me. I bought this one about five years ago. I never owned it before then. I would only hear it at other people's places because I always wanted it to be special."

"The thing about The Beatles, whether or not you think they’re good, as an introduction into like pop music, experimental music and avant garde music, it’s literally like every album is one of those text books you had at school, Beatles 1, then Beatles 2, then you’re ready to more on to Beatles 3. There’s some of their records that with hindsight weren’t particularly interesting, but The White Album is kind of mad. Often you remember it as better than it is, but as a product of what’s possible in terms of releasing music as a hugely popular band, what you can do if you want to do it, I think it’s a really brilliant thing. Without them having done that, someone else would have had to make that idea a reality for the world of music. And it’s got some really good tracks on it! I do think it’s becoming more and more acceptable to dislike the Beatles and that’s what I’m saying – you can totally not like them, but you’ll struggle to find another band that will teach you about music in such a beautiful way. The curious thing about The Beatles, speaking as a musician, is that everything you thought was magic, isn’t magic. They had press and radio people, people to create this event when they arrived in America, it wasn’t this spontaneous thing. I remember watching the Beatles anthology when it came out and finding it incredible, then I watched it recently and it feels really horrible. And you know that they themselves weren’t necessarily nice people, I feel duped!"