"This was the record that sold me on that band. When I lived in Sacramento California I lived right next door to this little club called the Press Club, and they were playing there. I was sitting on my porch and their van pulled up and I started talking to them. That was when they were touring that record, and it was my favourite record at that time. It's heavy, but it has a lot of groove to it - I don't know if there were too many groups who were doing that kind of riff rock, but it had all these discord sounds to it, and then two bass players, one of them using distortion the whole time and the other guy holding down the low end, the keyboard player playing vibes. It didn't sound like anything else at the time. They were from DC, where a lot of my favourite bands are from, like Fugazi, Minor Threat, these bands who started a lot of scenes in music. I never got too into political rock and roll, obviously great lyrics are great lyrics, but what grabs me is the cadence of the singer, how they choose to deliver the words. And that dude, he had this raspy voice, this distinct voice, to me it was more sex, he has this loungy kind of vibe. Lyrically he seemed to talk about partying, drugs, and girls."

"This is such an important record. It spawned a whole scene of music. You talk to any electronic musicians from the 90s onwards, and they'll say that. And they were just two boys from Leeds. I haven't seen him for a long while, but we worked with Gez, G-Man, we released his records in the 90s and I know what kind of guy he is. But I'd also spoken to Mark Bell, and Mark was very different. When I talk to Gez, I just talk to someone who's made a record, and he's just talking about his music. Mark was very clever and he was obviously the thinker of the two of them. But that combination of the two of them, those two guys: the title track with that bass, and 'Simon From Sydney', again it's a record that we've listened to a billion times. Gez used to say that they were part of a breakdancing crew, they were just mates, and they were so young when that record came out. I think they were 19, and they had a song in the top 20 and somebody on Radio 1 said their music was awful or something like that. They had everything happening at once at a very young age. I'm sure it affected them. But LFO were lads, you know. It wasn't high concept. It was dancefloor. That was what they were trying to do: to move people's butts and shake the bottom end."

"I was aware of who Black Flag were and I had heard people talking about them. I was in Exeter at a family funeral. I would have been about 14. I nipped out to a record store which was near to where the cathedral where the funeral was and I walked in as a nerdy little dickhead in my suit that I was wearing for the church service. The guy gave me a bit of a look and I asked him if he had anything by Black Flag and he pretty much fell off his chair. I loved that album to death. The beginning to Revenge is still the best start to any song written ever He sold me this album and I kind of knew I was looking for something that sounded like that at that point. It was becoming apparent to me that hardcore was the area of punk that I was particularly interested in. I loved that album to death. The beginning to Revenge is still the best start to any song written ever. I think about Black Flag a lot when I’m writing, in the sense of brevity is the soul of wit. Fix Me is my favourite Black Flag song and it's 42 seconds long. Every time I write a song that is longer than 42 seconds, which is all of my songs, there’s part of me that thinks I’m wasting my time or dawdling."

"The next one, I think we got to go to Bergman. We go to go to Seventh Seal. Seventh Seal just knocked me dead. On many levels, it’s such a simple film. You’ve got Mary and Joseph, the young people with their little traveling theater, and then you’ve got the knight. I think it was the way he dealt with the Middle Ages and intrigued me with Death there at playing chess. Those were images that just stuck in my head. It was funny. When I was doing Parnassus, I went back and looked at it, because I was trying to remind myself what Mary and Joseph and their little traveling theater was like. I had forgotten so much detail. That was just a really important film, and Max von Sydow was something… The first time I had seen basically a non-American actor at work. He looked different. He behaved differently. Because, you know, I grew up with Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Doris Day, Rock Hudson — shiny teeth and beautifully combed hair and all of that nonsense. Something profound was going on in that movie without pointing fingers at anything. It just did it. The squire — that was Gunnar Björnstrand, I think — was just a great character, the cynic in the midst of it all. I remember when he was talking, when he was in this church, and all the frescoes are there, and it’s just profound filmmaking."