"This was a component of my youth, really, it harks back to the stuff that would be played here, all those albums I dearly loved. The idea of Sly, that’s it. This dude that just soaked everything up, switched it all around to his advantage, just channelled all the shit that was going on, all this energy. He was really handsome anyway, but he channelled it all into himself. Imagine seeing that for the first time, imagine seeing him leaping out of nowhere. All these albums are quite punky in a way. Even though there’s a lot of maths going on, a lot of overplaying they’re all fucked up, weird people on PCP. The best biography I’ve ever read is Sly’s, its just a diary of everyone accounting for what happened over two years. Towards the end it’s him just getting rid of everyone slowly cos he’s going so nuts, and he’s got a Pitbull terrier called Gun that bites everyone that comes into the room while he’s sat there smoking angel dust."

"Isn’t it weird? How do they do that with their voices [ululates manically]? There’s a really good documentary called Death Cults or something, and it shows you them digging this enormous bunker, and [Elizabeth Clare Prophet] says: “The world is going to end on this date with a nuclear war”. The bunker’s not finished on time, but they go down anyway, come back out about a week later and the world hasn’t changed [laughs]. She says the master’s order wasn’t right, and that the world will actually be in four or five months. So they all go back down, and it doesn’t happen. It turns out she has brain tumours, which probably explains the entire cult, and then she dies. But it’s still going! They interviewed them a few years later. The women all look like Elizabeth Clare, with their suburban haircuts and clothes, and big smiles! There’s one piece on the album where they’re cursing pop music, and it’s just stunning. Hilarious. We play them at the beginning when we DJ!"

"In Talking Heads, the record collection was filled with Hamilton Bohannon, James Brown, Roxy Music, Funkadelic, and P-Funk, that whole world. George Clinton and his whole crazy P-Funk philosophy was great; they were doing these kind of spectacles. As we kept making records, they evolved into more rhythmic affairs, kind of weird, white-person funk. We decided that in order to represent this music live onstage, we needed to recruit some real funkers into the band. The size of the band pretty much doubled. It was a big, nervy thing to do, and it was a mess at first. But man, was it fun. In this period, I decided to formalize the tour into a show that became Stop Making Sense. And that was about as far as we could go with that idea. It liberated me musically, but also as a person. The music was a lot more ecstatic, almost trance-y; you could get lost in it, way more than you could when it’s just a four piece."

"It all started with us on the bus with a few guitars just singing the melody to what became 'The Jean Genie', but it was just naïve and silly. Then, a week later, Bowie came and said: 'Alright, I've finished that one!' And it was of course nowhere near what we had been singing lyrically, but the feel was there. It was one of those nods to good time rock & roll from the early days, spanning from the blues days right into the future. Although it was a very simple song, the lyrics were almost like a rap before rap came out, just with a blues rock backing. He was rapping about the weird scenes we were hanging out in in New York at the time. It just seemed to sum up a whole few years of the 1970s for us. There was weirdness in there, things you couldn't understand, sex, drugs and rock & roll are all in that song. It was, again, David going ahead and churning out a hit. And that one was a first take – that's what's on the record."

"I was aware of Bill Callahan through Smog and that, but I think these latest records that he's done are amazing. They're quite abstract in a way, it's really quite something, the lyrics are really good but the music is also really imaginative and the song structures are quite weird. He definitely doesn't stick to the pop song structure that I was talking about earlier on, but it is melodic, it's not atonal or anything. His records have a natural, very close sound, but it isn't straight folk or anything like that, the instruments are acoustic but then he goes off into these different realms. I think the latest record, that I'm just trying to get my head around at the moment, continues that. He's really thought of it as an album, it's a double and it's split up into four sides, and I know that when he was letting people know about it they released a side at a time, so it's conceived as those four or five songs sitting together as a suite. It's the best record I've heard in ages."