"I love Ghost Box. In a similar way to how British psych from the '60s looked back to a whimsical past and kids' fiction from the Victorian era, Ghost Box look back to a more modern past – specifically the '60s and '70s, which is when I grew up. It's an analogue sound that seems to evoke brutalist architecture, new towns and the like. You can imagine Ghost Box soundtracking a film about a new town built on a burial site. Jim [Jupp] and Julian [House, Ghost Box co-founder] come from Caldicot, which is a really spooky part of Wales. Lots of weird gothic architecture and a lot of weird local folklore and superstition. This record by the Belbury Poly [Jupp] presents someone's version of the past, a vision that's both real and ephemeral. It harks back to a time that wasn't obviously psychedelic but it's not obviously retro. Without being too rose-tinted specs about this record, it has a slight 'warm blanket' effect, while still being a little uncomfortable, if that makes sense. It's possibly a weird record for me to pick in a list of psychedelic records but it definitely does that thing of successfully imagining an alternate reality. I can imagine walking around this place."

"Time gets flattened out, because now we’re into the digital age. Usually, I’m quite a retro person, but my manager was one of the first people to buy an iPod, so I got one. But then I thought, When am I ever going to use that? It took me ages to take it out of the box—maybe four or five years—and then I just couldn’t see the point of carrying it around. The first song that I ever downloaded was Leonard Cohen’s “Death of a Ladies’ Man.” Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker are the two real touchstones in terms of people I’ve listened to consistently throughout my whole life. If you listen to that first Pulp record, it is just a direct rip off of his first album—though I’m not saying it was as good as that. I was very lucky to [meet Cohen] when his album Old Ideas came out. I hosted the playback of that in London, and then I interviewed him about it. I was nervous about doing that, but I’m really glad that I did. I didn’t get to know him so much, but at least I got to meet him, and I was able to tell him how much his work had meant to me."