"I remember hearing Johnny Appleseed and being like, ‘Yo! This is another level.’ It’s got like this Caribbean rhythm, acoustic guitars and simple harmonies, and him talking about everything from ’49 Buicks – which I knew everything about – to Martin Luther King tand even the old folklore of Johnny Appleseed. I really related to everything he was saying. When he asks in the song ‘Do you hear what I’m saying?’ I was like ‘Yeah dude, I do hear what you’re saying.’ There’s that question that he poses, too: ‘Is what was once true now no longer so?’ I still carry that line around with me today. That song shaped another facet of me as well, because it showed me that you could still play music with punk energy but you don’t have to play punk songs. It showed me that you could be political and social and talk about relationships or whatever, and still have the forcefulness of punk rock without playing aggressive music. And I don’t have no time to spike my hair up. That’s more show to me. At the time I was like, ‘I can only afford one shirt. Why the hell would I rip it up? If I rip it up and it rains then I’m gonna get wet.’ I’ve always tried to stay in that thing that it’s not about what you look like: it’s about what you do. You have to believe it and you have to mean it."

"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."