"There are some wicked arrangements by Jimmie Haskell here. The string arrangements and this diving, swooping orchestral score is something you'll hear on our new album. It's a composing style that I was enamoured by - just look at how the strings dive in and out of the lyrics. This was popular pretty much from when I could listen to radio from about 1969. I was three or four at the time. It's always been on the radio in America on oldie stations, it never stops! Especially where we live in the Catskills, we don't get alternative radio stations. The ones that do call themselves ""alternative"" play Dave Matthews."

"I actually saw Earth, Wind And Fire play. I went to a Santana gig in Manchester in 1975 and they were the support band. My God! They blew Santana – and me – away! They came on with flame-throwers and nearly singed our eyebrows off, you know? The music came with all kinds of layers and rogue elements like that Brazilian aspect in the chords. It's a really varied album and there's not much here in what you would call traditional black music. There are certain things here that crossed over, in the way that Stevie Wonder crossed over. The commercial radio station in Manchester was Piccadilly Radio and the Earth, Wind And Fire was always on Piccadilly Radio."

"There’s a song in the movie, “I Want to Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair,” that I used to have my radio producer play whenever some woman would call with a question about a man who was mistreating or ignoring her. People have to learn not to get stuck in one place, but to move on when it’s obvious that sticking around will only break your heart."

"I kept reading about punk, but the local radio station wouldn’t play punk; they didn’t think it was real music. That led to me one of the musical discoveries of my life. One night, I really wanted to hear what this punk music was and, turning the radio dial, I heard John Peel’s radio show. I started listening to it and taking songs off there all the time, and that became my musical education. It made me want to form a group; the early Pulp were really just a ragbag of the influences that we’d picked up from listening to John Peel’s show every night. The first Devo album came out that year [in 1978], and I went to see them play at the City Hall in Sheffield, which was quite influential. One of the first songs that Pulp learned how to play was the Devo song “Gut Feeling.” A couple of years later, when we first did some recordings, I took them to John Peel—he used to do these road shows at colleges, and I just went along to the one he did in Sheffield and hung around and gave him the tape after when he was putting all his records back into his DJ box at the end. He listened to it on the way home, and that really changed my life. Then he gave us a session [in 1981]. We were all still at school. I was 16 or maybe just 17, and the drummer was 15 and he looked about 12. He could hardly reach the bass drum pedal to play the drum."

"Fuck, I was so excited when I heard this song. I was staying up late one night - I can’t remember what radio show I was listening to, it was a radio that would play new songs - and I taped it off the radio. It was just so fucking cool, [sings “Dy-Na-Mi-Tee”]. I think that was the first song I heard where I thought ‘I could write a song.’ “After that I did my first ever performance in public. I’d done a school performance before that, but I did a performance with a garage MC who asked me to sing and I was ‘Lady K’ [laughs]. I sang in Croydon at a pub or something and I was doing the garage thing for a bit. That was the biggest music scene at that time in the UK, pirate radio was bigger than normal radio. I would go clubbing in Watford, I would grind in the clubs and I would get CDs from the DJs there who would have all new stuff. “That sort of reminds me of punk in a way, it was just kids in their bedrooms and they were running the clubs. I felt Ms. Dynamite did something really meaningful and she felt like a political artist to me. I don’t think I knew that at the time, but I think that’s why I was drawn in by her. I was looking at lyrics in a different way then too, thinking about the world a lot and wanting to help the world, maybe being political and not realising it. I wanted to write about the fucked up shit in the world."