"This is a record that I found from trawling the racks. It was the cover that intrigued me – a guy playing electric guitar in desert robes in a tent. I had to find out more. Tinariwen were a band that had an extended tribe, so people would come in and take over the vocals. They had different players. Later I learnt that the leader would take his guitar and go off into the desert and write the album under the stars. Years later I met up with them and discussed me and Brian Eno going out and spending time with their tribe, the Tuareg, and recording with them in the hills of Mali. We talked about it and started to plan it out, and then Underworld went on tour and that was that. Brian and I still talk about it. I listen to a lot of African music, that fantastic polyrhythmic, joyous tumbling sound which, for me, was techno. They did it so beautifully and made it sound haunting. They are a phenomenal group. This album was their first – it was recorded by a French group who had heard about their music and just went out to the desert and found them. It’s crudely beautiful."

"Me and Rick were living in a terraced house in Splott in Cardiff, near Tiger Bay. That’s where we formed our first band, Freur. We were making dub electronics and listening to dub reggae and Kraftwerk’s Computer World and Bowie’s Low. What blew us away was Brian’s (Eno) analogue electronic sound – that kind of degraded sound that he was making – and the fact that this great icon, a hugely famous singer and frontman, had chosen not to sing for half an album. What guts and courage that seemed to take. Years later you read that it ended up like that because he wasn’t around and that Brian experimented in his absence. But it takes great foresight and courage for David to come back and hear that and say, "yep, that’s the album." And not to think that because he’s a singer he has to blast away over the top of it. So that became a part of the blueprint for Underworld – that the singer doesn’t have to be the dominant force. He can play a supporting role. That Berlin period – the three Bowie albums and the Iggy Pop record – deepened the mythology of what I love about Berlin. The idea of going to a place and locking yourself away and making quite an extreme record in a different environment"