"Well everything’s been said about it, hasn’t it? Again, it was around the same time as Bring It On. I went out to South Africa for a gap year to work on a school. It was just as I was starting to smoke weed, it was exciting, and there were no responsibilities in life. I remember we didn’t have a music system out there, we had no money and a mate of mine went and bought a cassette player, it was a single deck cassette player, with terrible tinny speakers, but I had copied a tape of OK Computer before leaving! I don’t think I played any other album for about a year, it was on permanent rotation. What I found so compelling about it was that you can’t hear a single thing this guy’s singing! He has this real slurred delivery with every song and it was just an assault on the brain in terms of the production and the instrumentation and it was all coming through this terrible little tape player in South Africa! I thought I’d figured out what I thought the lyrics were and, largely, a lot of them were wrong, but I didn’t have the inlay card so I didn’t know! I just remember this haze of completely falling in love with the sound of this record and what I thought were the words. They really summed up the way a lot of people felt at the time, the alienation and the fear of a quickly changing world, all the pre-millennium stuff. It summed up the world that I occupied. It’s why it’s still the greatest album that I think has been put out in my lifetime; they're a band who, at that point, reached their songwriting peak, and [Thom Yorke]’s never got there since as far as I’m concerned. They were still young enough to have that punky quality but old enough to have those ballads that leave you feeling quite cold like 'Lucky' and 'No Surprises'. At that time, we were all just desperate to be Radiohead, everyone had the same set-ups and the same guitars! I can’t listen to it anymore though - as a band, if you’re influenced too much by one thing, as we were, it can kind of stifle you."

"I’m a huge admirer of Grace Jones in many, many ways. She came out of the fashion industry, made a disco record and then went on to make three classic records that I think are some of the greatest sounding things anyone has ever put out there. Those albums were produced by Alex Sadkin and Chris Blackwell, who had worked with Bob Marley before that. We first worked with Alex Sadkin on ‘Is There Something I Should Know?’ and he went on to produce Seven And The Ragged Tiger and the Arcadia album with me. So, we worked very closely with Alex and the reason we wanted to work with him at all was because of the Grace Jones album. I was so astounded when I heard the sound on Nightclubbing – the depth, quality and clarity of instrumentation and the vibe of it. I couldn’t understand how anyone had ever captured that. I needed to work with this person somehow and fortunately Alex turned out to be one of our great collaborations. Grace combined her style with a reggae influence, with a certain pop sensibility and with grooves that people could dance to and created something that only she could have done. It was entirely original and everyone in Duran Duran loves Grace Jones. We’ve played her records more than most other artists. We got to know Grace and hung out with her quite a lot. She did the Bond movie [A View To A Kill] that we were on the soundtrack for and she is did a cameo on ‘Election Day’ for Arcadia. I also think Grace is one of the most fascinating performers out there. The stuff she used to do with Jean-Paul Goude – the photography, the videos, the album covers – was so stylish. They had great taste. I truly love the songs on Nightclubbing. The original of the title track is on Iggy Pop’s The Idiot - which I love – written by Bowie and Iggy. The song had the darkest vibe you could imagine being done in Berlin during that period and that Grace took it and made it so different and beautiful was really something. Often with a cover you either like the original or the cover – with ‘Nightclubbing’ they are both great."