"I think I was on MySpace, that's how long ago it was, and I was looking for Omar Souleyman. I ended up finding Ali Hussan Kuban by mistake. I found this track called 'Habibi', and it blew my mind. The first bit of drums when it comes in, it's almost like drum & bass, but it's not but it's not folkloric African either, it feels like rock & roll. It's so direct, and it's speaking our language, but it's from a completely different culture, and I just love that. And when you hear his voice… His voice is killer - it sounds like Joe Strummer. His voice just feels so punk, especially later on when they start dubbing it and putting all this delay on it. It was that one song that made me start Melt Yourself Down. I was playing it at a party and people were going mad. By that point I'd been obsessed with this song for months, I was listening to it over and over again. Everyone I played it to was like: ""Oh my god, what the fuck is that?!"". I thought: I want to make a cover of this song, I want to start a band. Because I didn't have a band at the time. Acoustic Ladyland was over. I said: I think I'm going to form a band just to do that one song. The next day when I was coming down from my birthday party evening, I just thought, let's do that - brilliant idea. I phoned everybody and said: ""let's do it!"". I organised a rehearsal and then the next day I came to and thought: 'oh shit, I think a formed a band yesterday'. And then I thought, 'well OK, let's just start writing'. I went upstairs and wrote 'Fix My Life', and then it all came together really quickly."

"It was a real wake-up call. Hip hop until 1984, 85 was fun but for the most part it was party music. Living outside New York we'd listen to WBLS and Kiss FM where they played a lot of hip hop and me and my friends liked it, but it was very lighthearted. The Fatboys are the perfect example, or the Treacherous Three, where they have disco basslines and this fun vocal. Then almost out of nowhere Public Enemy happened. Everything about it was different. The lyrics were different, Chuck D's vocal approach was different, the subject matter and the production, the Bomb Squad. I remember hearing it for the first time and thinking how did they do this, because they've basically made punk rock hip hop, the sounds they were using, the way they were distorting basslines, it was a lot of the same ways industrial records were being made but they were making hip hop. It was so revolutionary. You can refer to musical culture in New York as before and after Public Enemy, it changed the city. New York was so dangerous then, it had the highest murder count, people were getting stabbed and shot and the crack epidemic was decimating communities and people were dying of AIDS. You'd go out to nightclubs in the late 80s and you'd hear these apocalyptic Public Enemy songs that perfectly described the city that you lived in, but they were oddly celebratory and you could dance to them. For better or worse one of the reasons I've left New York is because the city I grew up with is still there, but it's become a much meaner, safer version of its former self. I still love New York, but it's become primarily the domain of hedge fund managers and wealthy tourists, so I don't know how many more Suicides and Silver Apples and Public Enemys and Eric B & Rakims are going to come out New York City."

"The poster for Vagabond is an image of a woman with strange, defiant eyes and hair like that of an unkempt animal. In 1985, I was living in New York and going to the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. I had a pretty wild roommate named Lizzie who was really into punk rock. She would party all night and sleep all day. This poster was over her bed. You get the picture. She took me to see Vagabond. I still haven’t recovered. This film introduced me to the director Agnès Varda. Varda has a film language all her own, and anyone who wants to direct will learn story and camera technique by watching Vagabond. You’ll have a field day wondering how she constructed the seamless tracking shots. I had the opportunity to interview Varda, and she gave me the following insight with a glint in her eye: “I try to make something look simple.” Vagabond is a seemingly simple story that gets more complex as you watch it. It begins almost like Sunset Blvd. In the French countryside, the dead body of a young woman is discovered. She’s frozen as if she’s been there for days, and we don’t know anything about her. There is voice-over by Varda herself, not the victim. Who is this woman? How did she get here? Varda will explain for us. The movie plays with time, a theme in Varda’s work that she also explores in Cléo from 5 to 7. With tracking shots moving right to left, Varda goes back in time to reconstruct the events that led to this young woman freezing to death in a ditch. Sandrine Bonnaire’s performance is very raw, almost self-destructive, but very effective. There’s a “There but for the grace of God go I” feeling as you watch her. Every act of rebellion, every bottle of booze, every man she has sex with, brings her closer and closer to her demise. Even when someone is genuinely kind to her, you are wondering when the next act of betrayal will come. The world is a tough place, and sometimes the only grace is the dignity of death. Frozen and still."

"Continuing the otherworldly theme, as we’re looking chronologically at our lives and youth, this is the next song that hit me as a young person, at the age of seven or eight. The reason it hit me so hard, so young, was because it was one of the first songs that I understood was about death. “I grew up in the Catskill Mountains and Grasshopper grew up in Lake Erie, so we were well away from New York, punk rock or anything that was happening in the ‘70s, we were out in the hinterland. All that I could listen to was AM radio and ‘Seasons in the Sun’ was a massive hit, but lyrically its dealing with death, ‘Goodbye to you my trusted friend.’ He’s dying and I’m a young kid thinking ‘Why’s this guy dying on the radio? What’s he dying from?’ It was so much more than the syrupy, ‘I’ve got love in my tummy’ stuff that had come out of the ‘60s. “And this mystery, I was old enough to know what dying meant, but too young to understand that you could sing about it. Yet here was Terry Jacks singing this very sad, almost suicidal song and it hit me like a ton of bricks. now I started not only having to process music that I was deeply in love with, but also processing lyrics at seven or eight. The idea of the mystery within the song, that there were not only unanswered questions, but the biggest question, death. That’s what rang my bell, it was existentialism in a three-and-a-half-minute pop song. “I didn’t have all the tools to process it artistically at my young age but I knew it was deep, it was important and it was really, really sad. It was almost like a traumatic moment in early childhood that you didn’t experience directly, but indirectly it shook your bones, like the death of a relative you’ve barely met. You can tell everyone around you is ringing like a brass bell from it and that was something I got from that song."

"They were an underground band who started releasing cassettes in 1982 and are from Aberteifi in South West Wales, so they weren't part of a scene. They were from a small, working class town where, strangely, an interesting guy called Malcolm Neon had set up a cassette label, releasing electronic music in the Welsh language. So they kinda fit in – he put a tape of theirs out and gradually they released more albums, which would end up on the Anhrern, a punk rock Welsh language label which John Peel started to play. By the time Pyst came out in 1990, David R. Edwards' voice was becoming the key critical voice of the Welsh language. He held a mirror to society and to himself that was so brutally honest: they weren't embraced by the media at the time because they were misunderstood. They were gradually more acclaimed for their genius as time went on. The name of the band translates to English as 'developing', so they had experimenting as part of their reason for existing. By this time, it was David R. Edwards and Pat Morgan on bass and she brought a really distinctive musicality to the band. Their first two albums had been produced by Gorwel Owen who, for me, is like a Welsh Conny Plank, so everything was experimental but also really well-recorded. And this album [Datblygu] is a mixture of great songwriting. He can – when it's necessary - write a conventional pop song but delivered in a unique way like the classic, timeless songs. We covered one of these, 'Y Teimlad', on the Super Furry Animals' record Mwng. There are some great songs on this record – one is 'Ugain I Un' which is like a generic country and western song about being a horse [running] at [odds of] 20/1 who fails a jump and gets shot before the end of the song. There's another pop song called 'Am' which is just great pop music! But [the album is] always experimental and you could compare David to people like Mark E. Smith, Nick Cave and Allen Ginsberg, people with an honesty and darkness which is timeless as the lyrics deal with basic human traits. This isn't self-consciously Welsh. In fact, it's very critical of Welsh society in the Welsh language as that's the most honest way you could communicate [this idea]. And it captures Wales at that time where there was a great non-conformist musical streak going on ."

"I was really into them for a long time in the 70s and it coincided with early drug influences and when I jumped from the kind of psychedelia that the Beatles put forth to kind of what was happening in our own backyard on the West Coast with the Airplane and the Dead and Quicksilver.. The Beatles stopped so I never got the chance to see them, but the Dead came around a lot and so you got to see those bands. The Grateful Dead delved really deep into acoustic music, that was really important, and later their famous electric records, but Anthem of the Sun was in their early period. One of the things I keep talking about with my new record Electric Trim is that it was really created in the studio and I keep mentioning Dark Side of The Moon or Pet Sounds or Revolver or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when I should be referencing Anthem of the Sun Anthem of the Sun was the kind of record that they were trying to construct in a studio. It’s a studio experience of a live concert experience, so they were mixing all this stuff they recorded in all the studio with all these different live takes, slowing things down and speeding things up and thinking of all these trippy aspects of the way the sound exists in stereo space. A couple of those guys, especially Phil Lesh trained alongside Steve Reich at school and studied Luciano Berio and all this 20th century modernist stuff, so he was aware of where music was going on that level and they were just at a cross roads where they weren’t sure they wanted to be a straight ahead rock band. They had moments of being a rock dance band and then they had other aspirations. I love listening to Anthem of the Sun because it may not be perfect, or achieved what they really wanted, but it’s one of those records that set its sights really high and whether or not it got all the way there it achieved something really unique. There’s not many records that sound like that, not just the fact they were splicing together live tapes from 30 different gigs, it was kind of a ridiculous stoned or drugged task from the beginning but they threw their back against the wheel, and tried to do it. If you ever listen to that record with headphones it’s so rich. I was really into them for a long time but once New York City punk and all that stuff happened I kind of dropped it like a hot potato and went onto other stuff and it was only in the last 7 or 8 years that I’ve come back to my appreciation of it through a number of different avenues. I was involved a couple of years ago with this record that this group The National put together called Day of the Dead where they covered 60 songs or something and they asked me to cover ‘Mountains of the Moon’. There were a couple of good Dead songs I was listening to at the time because they related to a song I was doing for my record with The Dust – Last Night on Earth and when I went to record with them they played me a lot of the songs they were working on and whether you like 30 minute noodling electric guitar solos or not you can put that aside and say the thing that impressed me about what they were doing was how great their song writing was. Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter especially, wrote a lot of amazing songs together and that’s what really struck me – that’s why I liked these guys way back when because they had really great songs. Their songs are like the 60s era American songbook. And it was also in this period where I was thinking that I wanted a lyrical collaborator and so the idea of Hunter’s role with Garcia in that band especially or like when Dylan turned to either Robert Hunter or Jacques Levy for inspiration when he was working on Desire Dylan doesn’t need a lyrical collaborator - why’s he working with outside lyricists? And yet at some point he thought “I need someone else to shift the viewpoint”. So that’s what inspired me to ask Jonathan Lethem to work on Electric Trim. We’d known each other for a long time and I just felt like this was a good time to get someone else’s input, put another voice in the mix. Every single aspect of the record, words, lyrics, tunes didn’t have to spring from me. Music can be very collaborative and I’ve kind of come up in a very collaborative situation with Sonic Youth for so many years – every song was listed as all four of us writing it, ‘cos that’s ultimately what happened. In Sonic Youth, it was only a very rare occasion where one of us came in and said, “Hey I’ve got a new song this is how it goes…”