"The first heard time I heard Roxy Music I was smitten. I was in a record store and I asked the guy ‘What are you playing?’ They used to put the record jackets on the front desk, I picked it up and they looked like a band from outer space. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but I loved everything about it, ‘Virginia Plain’ was just an incredible sounding song. It’s the way the synthesiser bends at the start, then the songs kicks in and Bryan Ferry’s singing is so over the top and melodramatic, I’m not even sure what he’s singing about. There’s those breaks where they jam in the middle, the keyboard and synth solos. It was the sonic template, it sounded completely otherworldly to me. I felt a kinship with Roxy Music. I grew up listening to The Who and The Beatles and they were rock stars, but I felt Roxy Music were sort of my peers. With a lot of the new wave and punk bands I thought ‘I can do this, I can be in bands and do what they’re doing.’ It didn’t sound anything like the classic rock records I’d been listening to, it was arty, very flamboyant and kind of crude in a way. It was a bit pretentious but I liked that, I found it really fresh at the time that they had an art-school approach to the music and yet the music was very DIY, it wasn’t slick. They were great musicians but didn’t sound like virtuoso bands like Yes or Emerson, Lake and Palmer, though I did have some ELP records too! I fell in love with Roxy Music, I bought all their records, their solo records and live bootlegs. I was the self-appointed president of the Roxy Music fan club in Madison, there were only seven members. For a couple of years, once every two months we’d have a ‘Roxython’ on a Saturday night until the sun came up, we’d play their albums and dress up in very flamboyant clothes. It was great."

"The reason I chose “Temptation” was because it gave me the confidence to write a song called “Pure”. I’d made my first album and it was quite difficult, because I didn’t have a band and I’d recorded it all at home. I was lucky in that it had done quite well and “Pure” had been in the charts in America and stuff like that, but I felt like I didn’t quite know what to do. It didn’t feel right to just hire a load of musicians and have a band that wasn’t really a band. Then I heard “Eye Know” by De La Soul and it was the first time that I’d heard people sampling records and using beats, I loved it and listened to it a lot. I’d been producing The Fall at the time and I was very friendly with a guy called Simon Rogers, who was a really good musician and he had a sampler. With hip-hop, they tended to have the samples and sing over the samples to come up with something, but I wondered if you could use the samples in your songs, and if it would be possible to craft a song while using samples. I don’t know if anyone had actually done that yet - it was mainly people singing over samples, but not making the samples fit in their tunes - so on the next album Sense that’s what I tried to do. It worked out quite well on the tracks like “Sense” and “The Life of Riley” but it was quite hard on the others. Then I honed it down and got better at it and I did Jollification, which is pretty much all recorded like that, with bits of samples. Jollification isn’t really a band, but a record constructed in a similar way to how De La Soul might have constructed 3 Feet High and Rising but using songs and not singing along over the record. That album really shone a light on how to make a more vibey and serendipitous record than if I just sat there with a computer."

"I would imagine many babies were conceived to this album. If you think you're a singer or you want to do a bit of singing, it's a must listen album. Even when he's just scatting the lyrics and singing along to a melody – which is the way he apparently used to write a lot of stuff, by just going to the mic and ad libbing – he's amazing. I'm not very interested in politics as a musician – never have been – but he managed to incorporate what was going on in US politics at that time in a highly poetic way. I got to meet him and perform on a show with him at the Motown 25 concert in 1983. That was Marvin's last performance. I did 'Where Did Our Love Go' and Diana Ross came on stage when I was doing it, which was quite an event. She just danced around me and then went off. There was a knock on my dressing room door before the show and I opened the door and he said, ""Hi I'm Marvin Gaye"" and I said, ""I know you are!"" He just came to say thanks for doing the show. He was a really nice guy. And when I came off the stage, him and Smokey Robinson were waiting for me and they put their arms round me and all that. It was nice to meet him; he was such a gentle soul. Berry Gordy's No 2 was a woman called Suzanne de Passe who was the MD of the company and she'd seen my videos and heard my stuff, and Berry liked it. The theme of the show was 'Yesterday, Today, Forever', and he wanted something that was in the future style. I think I performed with all my heroes and heroines that night. I'd been listening to their songs all my life. I had the unenviable task of following Michael Jackson. He sang 'Billie Jean' and did the moonwalk for the first time. I was ten feet away from him when he did that. It was quite a memorable evening."