"Hip-hop has always been such a big thing for me, particularly hip-hop production. So many of my favourite producers growing up, and the reason why I wanted to make produced music, came from people like RZA, Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, Timbaland and early Neptunes, early Kanye even - and Madlib and J Dilla are both right up there. I picked these two albums [J Dilla's Donuts is also on the list] that came out on the same label and from the same scene rather than say, Illmatic, because at that point in my life there was a sense of like, no matter how much I liked Public Enemy or A Tribe Called Quest records, I was coming to them late. But I can remember Madvillainy leaking way in advance and thinking it was so exciting being there for it happening. I think it will be remembered as a classic record. I've got to know Madlib since then, which is amazing because he's an absolute hero. I'm coming to hip-hop more from a production point of view rather than listening to the MCing or the lyrics - that's because I produce music. But this is a record where the Doom part and the Madlib are so perfectly matched. It's like the greatest hits of beat producing - every track is completely insane. The way he cuts up the samples is so, so heavy! I think it's pretty much perfect. It's so eccentric. There aren't that many genres of music where eccentricity is embraced in the same way. This is a really, really weird record, but it's totally canonised as being a classic record. That's wonderful. Maybe in the same way Theo Parrish's music is - people embrace that weirdness, but there are other genres of music where they don't. The feeling I got when I made Swim - and it was a little revelation - was that if you asked your general public person about dance music they'd say it's all the same and formulaic, there's got to be a repetitive beat and blah blah blah. But the fact that there is a kind of repetitive rhythmic element is actually quite liberating - so long as it's got that framework you can do anything else on top of it. You don't necessarily have to have something that functions as a song. And hip-hop's the same thing - so long as there's a beat that moves you, the other things around it don't really matter, you can do what you like. You can have a sample of a Pakistani singer over the top or an old soul record or even just random drum machine hits firing off all over the place - there's a crazy variety of things Madlib does when he's producing. But because it still makes your head nod, you can leave that area and be more free."

"I got that record from my brother-in-law for Christmas - we have this huge family and so we were picking names from a hat and whoever you got the name of you bought a present for. My brother-in-law was this cool fucking dude who listened to college radio and he got me that first Clash record and I got to see them later that year so I guess it was Christmas 1978. We had the US version, it was just called The Clash with the green cover – you knew that if you were American, 'cos we were like, ""we cant get the real fucking English version"" - I mean they had it on import, but it was so expensive. I don’t know what my musical life would have been like if I didn’t get to see that gig. It was really exotic for that band to come and play Seattle. The whole Seattle community was there and it was probably only 200 people but it felt like everybody in the world was there. I remember there was this wooden barrier and this security guy in front of the pit who didn’t know how to deal with a punk rock audience, and he just decked this kid and broke his nose and The Clash just stopped the gig. And Paul Simonon or someone grabbed an axe and broke down the barrier! And I remember Joe Strummer saying, ""there’s no difference between us and you guys, these barriers and shit are separating us"", and it suddenly dawned on me. They were totally against the whole rock star thing, like there’s not us and there’s you, it was like we were all in this together. I guess I’d be lying if I said in the nineties I didn’t have… not ‘punk rock guilt’ exactly, but there would be a lot of bands that came up, like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, there were guys who were in the punk rock scene and this was what was next, and as a young dude you feel a little guilty when you’re suddenly selling millions of records. But no-one sold their soul or changed their fucking tune, this was what evolved out of punk rock. Looking back it was a natural progression. Guns was a mix of a lot of different input, punk rock, seventies rock, and it was about doing something different and maybe that’s what punk rock sounded like at that point, I don’t know (laughs). I mean Guns was as DIY as it got, we would hitchhike 1,200 miles to get to a gig but we just went to the next level in getting a major label deal, that was the big change. But I took that ethic with me that Strummer had said. I don’t know any different, I’m honoured to be playing gigs and I’ve always paid tribute to that way of thinking."

"Jeff Buckley’s vocal range is staggering. He’s basically a classical singer, he’s so technically gifted. When I was on tour as Cat’s Eyes a lot of the singers that sing with us are classical singers, and on tour this year we were discussing who you think has the best musicality – and Jeff Buckley was one of the people that we mentioned. I don’t know much about his life other than who his Dad was, but I think it’s actually really rare to hear a singer within guitar music that has such musicality. I don’t think it can be taught either, I think it’s just something he has innately. His tone is incredible on this, it’s unreal. This is something you can’t copy, it’s only something you can appreciate. As someone who learnt to sing really late in life, it’s interesting to me. I learnt from scratch, just from playing. At the beginning of The Horrors it was a lot more shouting, spontaneous and came out of nowhere, just raw expression. I feel like none of us really knew what we were doing. In a way I think just reacting instinctively is the best way to get into things that you love, but I learnt a lot from Rachel (Zeffira) of Cat’s Eyes. She was an opera singer originally, before we met. Singing with her I was able to access my own musicality, which is a hard thing to do. What’s really great about this song is that Jeff Buckley chose to do it in the first place. If you listen to the whole of Grace, this song comes out of nowhere. The fact that he was brave enough to choose a classical piece and put it on his record, and for it to work as well – the bravery of it is inspiring. There’s a vulnerability to this song that you don’t hear in a lot of male singers. It’s easy for someone in the charts like Sam Smith to portray ‘emotion’, but to me his voice transmits no emotion because I feel like its trained emotion. They’re worlds apart. Maybe it’s too easy to target these artists because their songs are made for a purpose, but ‘Corpus Christi Carol’, and Jeff Buckley’s voice in general, has a vulnerability to it that first of all, male singers are afraid to show, and second of all, they wouldn’t be able to do it because they don’t have the soul or technique – and it’s not something male singers aspire to either. I have no idea when I first heard this song. A lot of people at school liked Jeff Buckley but this song was kind of tucked away in the record. It took me a while to find the song and hear it, but I heard it on its own one night and hearing it like that I could really appreciate how totally unique it is"

"The ‘60s things we’ve discussed were a really big influence on me - it almost seemed like an early dream - but then I got into the Bowie, glam rock thing, which was my first choice of things in a way. That led me into New York punk rock and that’s the bit that made me pick up the guitar. I’d played the guitar a bit, but along with Television, Talking Heads made me want to be in a band and that whole scene inspired me much more than English punk rock. That time very much felt like a new chapter - ‘out with the old, and in with the new’ - and I guess that’s what punk rock was, but I thought a lot of the English punk bands were a bit crap. There were a few good ones and a lot of people talk about The Clash and The Pistols, but for me it was Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Blondie, MC5, New York Dolls and Iggy Pop. I loved all that stuff and it somehow seemed to fit with glam rock, with Bowie, Roxy Music and Marc Bolan and led me into Talking Heads and that whole thing. When I was an unemployed kid I’d get the bus into town, wander around and meet loads of people who wanted to form bands. There weren’t many people into The Velvet Underground back then, which I was at the time and I was a bit of a misfit in many ways. Matthew Street in Liverpool was a run-down area of empty warehouses then and there was nothing much there, but I met a lot of likeminded people around a warehouse called The Liverpool School of Music, Dream, Art and Pun and that was where I first met a lot of the guys who ended up in my first band. Opposite to that there was a record shop called Probe, a tea rooms and a club called Eric’s, and they became the centre of my everyday existence. Eric’s was set up by a guy called Roger Eagle who had been in Manchester. He was a Northern Soul DJ and a music aficionado and was heavily involved in the scene. Although those bands weren’t mainstream at that point, I got to see them all at Eric’s, which was brilliant. We got let into the gigs for free in return for helping them to carry amps and I got to chat to all of the bands that I loved at the time. As a song, “Psycho Killer” really stood out. It was very compelling and there was the whole idea of how David Byrne looked like he was a college professor or something, he was so awkward and gangly, but he had brilliant words. I remember thinking at the time ‘He’s not singing about the usual things, how are these words in a song? How do you do this?!’"