"I first started listening to The Slits when I was about 8, with my friend Antonia, and we stole all her brother's Slits records and used to dance around the room pretending we were the Slits. I just picked this because I'm sure it was a huge part of my life. If I could have been any kind of singer, I would have been a punk - I thought I was a little punk growing up! I wanted to be in The Slits, I wanted to be that kind of a woman, but I grew up to be a folk singer, and that's alright too - I like that. It's just the attitude - I hear The Slits and I'm immediately back in that time. It was a one-off period, it was an exciting time and they kind of encapsulated a sense of anarchic joy. The songs are fucking fantastic as well. There's that ska element, punk, reggae and they're British and they're fantastic. I don't know if there's ever been anyone like them since."

"I’d never seen the Stooges as early punks or anything—that’s media manipulation of facts; I loved them, but I was always appalled with their long hair. By this time my record collection was enormous and expanding, and my tastes were extremely varied. During the punk years, I really loved the Raincoats and X-Ray Spex and the Adverts, groups that were doing things way out on their own. There was plenty of experimentation going on musically in all areas, particularly reggae.” “I lack prejudice except for music that I find to be reminiscent of somebody else’s work—I find no need for endless Chuck Berry versions, which was very popular at the time. And I had little time for what was coming out of America; bands like Television never really grabbed me, I just couldn’t connect. It was all too clever for its own good and wrapped up in too much Rimbaud poetry: Get over it and write about your own life, not what you find in books."

"If I was trying to be cool I’d say Bitches Brew, but this is the seminal album really, isn’t it? The great Coltrane’s on it. It was an astonishing band. It had such a tone to it. For a lot of music that I love, whether it’s dub reggae or electronics or classical or choral music, it’s about soundscape, it’s about tone. I can link the Burial album into Kind Of Blue. A few years ago somebody gave me a very high definition LaserDisc – it was next generation after LaserDisc. It was of Kind Of Blue and it had been remastered. It sounded like the sounds had separated off and they were no longer mashing together as was intended. And it sounded horrible and soulless. I just took it off and never played it again. This is real fusion of sound, though it’s not fusion jazz, and the sounds cross over each other and complement each other so beautifully. It’s the perfect soundscape. It’s another wardrobe in my head."

"I got really into reggae music in high school. Her vocals, her phrasing, everything taught me so much about how to put emphasis on different syllables, the way to punctuate things, making something sound extremely effortless when it wasn't. She's having fun and goofing around but I know that it takes a lot of work to make it sound like that. That was something that really appealed to me, wanting things to sound alive, effortless and fun while still touching on heavy issues. She just has a fucking great voice, as a singer she's just inspirational. I hadn't started doing anything yet, that was before college, I probably didn't own the album to be honest, I just taped stuff off the radio. I couldn't afford to buy a lot of records and my parents never had a lot of records. We'd buy singles at this place called Roxy Maxis for 99 cents. I taped all of the stuff on cassette so I'm sorry that I didn't pay for it."