"Now I’m in New York, in a band with Chris Frantz and his girlfriend, Tina [Weymouth], and we didn’t have a super-duper plan. I had ambitions to be a fine artist and show in galleries, but I was also writing songs. This club, CBGB, had opened around the corner, and there were bands like Television playing, and Patti Smith was doing poetry readings. We thought, If we learn some songs, we can play there. I had a day job as what was called a “stat man” for a company that designed Revlon counter displays. So I worked in a little dark room in the middle of this office—which meant I had a little radio in there, and I could listen to music. And nobody else would bother me. Bowie was on the radio a little bit, and he was a huge influence for a lot of people. I was aware of all the Ziggy Stardust stuff, and then him moving onto the Berlin stuff. Somewhere around this time, in the late ’70s, after we made our first record, we met Brian Eno, who had worked with him on Low, and that was very cool for us. In 1980, I went with Toni Basil to see Bowie in The Elephant Man. He was reading the collected speeches of Fidel Castro at the time, and he gave me the book and said, “You might enjoy this.” I dutifully read it. Castro could really ramble on. Really ramble on."

"I found out about Serafina through the radio show. It was right at the beginning of the Sunday Service and I was trying to be diligent and listen to all the records that I was sent, but it quickly became apparent that was never going to work and I was getting depressed that there were so many bad records. I was down in the dumps and then I put on her album Change Is Good Change Is Good and I really liked it, it made me forget the previous eight hours of boredom. I went to see her do a concert at Cafe Oto, and really enjoyed it. Again it's a bit like Bill Callahan, it's melodic and the words are good but structure-wise it goes all over the place, I'm always impressed by and a little bit jealous of people who can do that. We got to know each other a bit, I got to play on a couple of things, and when she was getting her next record together she asked if I would produce it. So I produced this record and I know it very well, but I wanted it to be in there because it's been a very important thing for me, she's now in the Jarv Is band and is very involved in the music of that. I've got the radio show to thank for us because I'd probably never have been aware of her. I discovered a lot of great music through the show and this led to a creative partnership."

"It’s virtually impossible to find their early records. This particular record – their first album – I’ve tried to play on radio shows before, but it’s difficult because the language that they use is banned on radio. They use words that were then commonplace to describe their brothers and sisters, but are now not seen in the same way. Words that were in common usage in the sixties and now are not and for very good reason. But then they carried a very different potency. The thing I love about The Last Poets is that they are very direct, they pull no punches, they’re speaking to their community in way that Gil Scott-Heron did a lot. He also wasn’t afraid to say exactly how he felt about how his community was living. And The Last Poets did that too, with rhythmical words set to a very simple beat, in this case played on congas. One of their later albums even had Jimi Hendrix on it, and Buddy Miles. But this is the rawest, just a group of voices. They were the forerunners of rap. Using voices in unison to underline phrases and to make certain phrases more forceful, and all of this to an infectious groove. That’s all of what I love about rap music and urban poetry. It became part of what Underworld assimilated in our eclectic nature. The Last Poets throw the gauntlet down. If you want to write about the urban condition, there’s your benchmark. I can’t come close."