"I was a weekend punk. It has got to be in the top ten best albums ever. It's one of those records that your parents would hate so you loved it. The whole rebel thing was the main thing. 'Pretty Vacant', when I first heard that I thought bloody hell... Again, my best friend, he was into The Sex Pistols before I was, and this was one of the first bands that he switched me over to, I thought "Yeah, they're pretty good". [laughs] We weren't early punks or anything, we weren't on the crest of it. We were in Basildon, Essex, so we were two years too late. I could never make a record like that, I wouldn't know where to start, so I have admiration for people who can do that kind of stuff"

"Call it Extreme Southern Gothic, New Orleans division. The protagonists of this dark French Quarter novel are knee-deep in murder, torture, sex and cannibalism. The story is unabashedly grim (or as Brite himself puts it, “twisted, horrific”), but Brite’s prose is crystal clear, and his literate tone is sufficiently wry and ironic that it creates a sort of safety zone in which readers not normally drawn to this sort of stuff (myself included) can take refuge while they read. But even arm’s-length readers are apt to find themselves being drawn further and further into the story—seduced in spite of the themselves. Material that would be merely sick, disgusting, and unreadable in the hands of a lesser writer is, with Brite at the controls, surprisingly erotic and captivating. It’s a tour de force, in a literary category all by itself."

"I played British and Irish folk in an early band I had. We only performed one show and Rostam [Batmanglij, Vampire Weekend multi-instrumentalist] was also in the group, so this was the roots of Vampire Weekend. We covered 'Matty Groves' from this album. It's a traditional song about adultery, anger and sex, and I thought it was cool that they could take ancient-sounding stories and make them relevant. It's an important lesson – if you want to reinvent the wheel, maybe pop music isn't for you. As much as it's about being progressive, it's also rooted in a certain respect for the form. Which might seem paradoxical, but that's what pop music is – it combines very old ideas with very new sounds. Fairport are an example of that, taking very old songs in the English language and reinventing them."