"I always wanted to be a songwriter and not a producer. Even though I ended up producing a fair few bands over the years, it wasn’t something I ever particularly wanted to do. With Echo & The Bunnymen, they were such a special band because of the chemistry and I always wanted to be in a band like that. The Beatles were like that, as were The Beach Boys and The Kinks. I felt like that was never going to happen for me, I never thought I’d meet someone who would be a singer, and I never wanted to be a singer. When Ian Curtis sadly died and New Order were going to carry on, I remember hearing “Temptation” for the first time and thinking ‘Bernard can’t sing at all but it’s great, it doesn’t matter that he can’t sing’. I’d have these ideas in my head and I’ve always felt with music that if you’ve got a good idea but you don’t do it very well, then it’s still a good idea. If you don’t have a good idea, no matter how well you do it, it will never be a good idea. That sounds obvious, but it’s always been my mantra for everything I’ve done. I loved everything about that track, the backing vocals, the singing and it made me feel like I could maybe do that, that I could be not very good at singing as well. I was already doing music at the time, but it gave me the confidence to sing on my tunes and give up on finding a singer. “Temptation” inspired me to get behind the mic myself, and if you have a good idea, then something will come of it."

"I'm just realising as we're going through them - so many of these songs are about loss aren't they? ‘To the East’ isn’t just straight-up melancholy, it’s a song of hope as well; it might be completely redundant, impotent hope, but there is still hope in there. “She's singing to somebody to come back and that the East could be home, but the whole time you're listening to it you suspect the truth of the situation is that those words will never actually be said. Or maybe that's just the way I'm feeling it, I don't know. Again though, it's a very easy song to empathise with; I really believe the voice that's singing it to me. I don't know whether it's about a personal experience or if they're just imagined characters and to be honest, I don't care. I'm right there with them - I'm feeling it too. “I think either our first or second ever show outside of Britain - I can't remember which - was with Electrelane, in Barcelona at that club, Razzmatazz. It was quite the thrill, to be leaving the country to open up for this band we loved. I was really sad when they split up - again, another loss. I wish they were still performing. I think the last time I saw them was at Field Day in 2011 and they were still so great. They did a cover of 'I'm on Fire' by Bruce Springsteen and it was really something else. “They're one of those bands where you only need to hear a few seconds of any given song to know it's them, which means they've also got that trick of being able to make a cover sound like they wrote it themselves.”"

"I was doing a lecture tour mostly in California and I was being driven from place to place by my friend David Snow. I bought this CD [Glider], I don't know why I brought it with me, I hadn't heard it, I'd just picked it up on the way over from England. I put this first song on ('Soon') and I never played anything else. I don't know if I ever have ever played the other songs on it. I just put that thing on and it's just such a sonic experience, and in a car it's amazing. We had a hired car with an amazing sound system, and just being inside that music actually has a lot to do with what I'm doing now with this three-dimensional thing. You get that feeling in a car where you're really inside the music, you don't really get it in a room very often. It's such a statement. I remember that experience in the car so strongly as we hadn't actually used the hi-fi before in the car and it was turned up really loud. Oh my god. It's so chaotic, and recording doesn't capture chaos very well, it usually tames it, it contains it in a way. Again, it's about voices. One of the things that I really love in that is the fact that there's singing in there but you have no idea what it's doing. You can hear that somewhere in that thicket of noise there's somebody doing something but you have no idea what it is. I thought that was great, that singing could be like that. It doesn't have to be this person at the front with all the articulation and every word clear. It can just be a person in that mess and that was a real liberation for me."

"Whoever it was that said this album didn't sell a lot of copies but every person who bought it went on to form a band, I think there is probably some truth in that. It is such an influential record; such a truly unique, maverick record and it's one of the records I play more than anything else. I often go back to it now - I will just feel like needing to hear 'Venus In Furs'. It still sounds weirdly modern considering it was made in the sixties. I love the whole way The Velvet Underground went about things - John Cale playing viola, Nico singing on some of the songs and Lou singing on others. It has a feel to it that is unlike anything and nobody has really touched for originality since then. It sounds so strange - it was made in New York during a period that has the whole mystique of Andy Warhol’s Factory. It's also one of the great album covers of our time – Warhol’s peeling banana. I knew Andy very well throughout the eighties until he sadly died. That whole scene was so stylish and underground - they had the perfect name. I've been lucky enough over the years to meet John Cale a bunch of times and Lou Reed - I sat next to Lou at a dinner a few months back - and to me they are still great icons of modern music. We actually played with Lou onstage once in the late eighties. We did a charity show and he came and played 'Sweet Jane' and 'Walk On The Wild Side' with us, which was surreal. We have covered 'Femme Fatale' - we could cover the entire album but it wouldn't be nearly as good so there's no point."

"I was into so much stuff around this time. It was 1981 and I was 12, turning 13 at the end of the year. I loved Duran Duran and Associates, 2 Tone stuff, ABC, The Jam... it didn't really matter then. You didn't have to be part of any tribe. We had them, but we never called them mods or rockers or whatever. We had the Sweats - they were the heavy guys who used to sit in a circle and smoke dope on the school field. They liked Motörhead and they all stank of patchouli oil. But they were all very friendly. Then there the Smoothies - they were more like mods really. Very tidy and neat, with these wedge haircuts. But I could never really do that. I could be one thing one day, and something else the next. I liked 'Ace Of Spades' at the same time as liking 'Planet Earth'. It was all the same thing. I remember being in class and we were all talking about 'Love Action', and singing the middle bit - "I believe, I believe what the old man says...", which I thought was profoundly wise at the time. It's still pretty good. I like the line, "I believe in truth/ Though I lie a lot." The noises in the intro really intrigued me. And for a while I did put the air guitar down and get my mum's ironing board out and play the synths on that. The music's quite cold - it's quite a cold groove for a love song. And it is a love song. His voice is kind of warm, but he's got such authority - you believe everything he's singing. At the end of that year, when Dare came out, everybody had it. It was great."