"When I was in eighth grade I ran for a student body secretary, or something like that, and all the kids would campaign for a month or so before the elections, putting up posters or whatever. And then on the election day everybody had to give a speech, or have some sort of audio presentation that got played over the school's PA. So there were periods on election day when everyone would be in the home room and you'd have to sit through all these speeches that the 13/14-year-olds were making. And I made my speech using the Deee-Lite tape. I had a double cassette boom box and I would dub different parts of the Deee-Lite tape and mix it up so that it built a speech. I didn't keep it. I feel like it must be in the possession of some member of my family, in a box somewhere. I'd kind of forgotten about that until recently but it turned up in my head recently. Unfortunately I don't really know anyone from that period in my life anymore so there wasn't anybody I could ask about it. I never really put it together that long, long before I had any knowledge of what dance music was, or what sampling or dubbing was I did this thing. But it certainly wasn't cool. I think it confused pretty much everybody in my school. I don't even remember what it said, but I remember feeling very proud of it even though everyone thought I was totally weird and a freak."

"I first heard this on the radio in the car about six months ago. Rarely will anything break my concentration when I’m driving but occasionally I’ll hear something and think ‘Wow, that’s got something’ and make a note of it to listen to later and this sir Was track sounded great. The Lemon Twigs’ record did that, when I heard some of those tracks I really liked the attitude, they’re very stylistic and retro to a degree, but the attitude was real enough to not make it all about the style. “So when I heard ‘In The Midst’ I really liked the beat. When I listen to something I think the sound hits me first and I’ll get into the track later on, where I’ll get into the lyrics and the more I hear it I’ll know the workings of the track, but with that first instinctive listen, I normally hear a bassline or the beat. “There’s a song on World’s Strongest Man called ‘The Oaks’ - I call it ‘The Billie Jean Beat’, it’s a running ‘Billie Jean’ beat with a loop over it - and ‘In The Midst’ has got this Al Green beat to it with these reverbed vocals that are almost like The Flamingos and The Shangri-Las. I listened to more of the sir Was record and it’s quite a weird record actually, there’s some great moments and then there’s some stuff I’m not so into, but I definitely like the attitude and the sound on this track. Sonically ‘In The Midst’ is up my street, it’s really cool."

"That's like a bookend thing really, because it's one of the latest records I bought, only two months ago. Side one is the best side, sometimes he gets a bit busy, but the first track starts so sparsely, it's incredible. I saw Terry Riley recently when I was playing at the Primavera Festival. Everybody ends up staying in the same hotel near the site and a lift door opened and I saw him and he went 'hello Jarvis', and that was a very proud moment because I've only met him once before. Mark Webber, who was the guitarist in Pulp, he knew Terry Riley a bit and we actually did a performance of 'In C' with him at the Barbican years and years ago, and he remembered me from that. I was really touched. I think it's a really romantic record - none of these records have to be for any purpose but I have to say if you want to get it on with someone, it's a good one to put on. When Mark first introduced me to minimalism I thought 'there's not much happening here', but it makes you listen to music in a different way, you're listening to the actual sound of it. That expands your mind. Persian Surgery Dervishes is using that weird tuning, with loads more notes, it's questioning the idea of the Western scale, saying we can find notes within the notes. It's a long way from pop music, it's exciting, it's good to know you can be enthralled by music in which not very much happens. 
"

"I think I came across this record because it was produced by Dave Fridmann and I was interested in him at the time because of other stuff he’d done, particularly The Flaming Lips. I heard this record and asked other people about it and they were saying, 'Aren’t they kind of folksy?' And I was like, 'No! What? Have you not listened to them?' Because this album does have that quiet, acoustic thing at the heart of it, but Fridmann has produced it like In Utero or something. Almost all of the instruments are pushing at the top of the range and it gives this really weird feeling of a loud quiet band. This song ‘Cue The Strings’ has this kind of crappy, wind-up string sound, that sounds like it’s been recorded onto tape a hundred times with two voices singing over it. That’s all that’s in it. But you get this feeling as it goes on that it’s absolutely massive and it’s hard to describe why, but I think it’s something to do with that production, the way it’s just biting at the distortion level. It’s got this swelling feeling that’s like the sun rising and that matches the lyric; 'Here comes the cold sunshine.' You get the feeling of being on a planet that has no atmosphere and when the sun rises you’re going to get burned up. It feels like such a huge sound but it’s really only two voices and a keyboard. I think that’s a great example of the power of production."

"I saw this one as a kid on PBS, I think. It was weird timing for that movie when it came out, and it was perceived in many different ways. I think it was probably one of the boldest statements from Charlie Chaplin. And I remember as a kid being very confused because I was terrified of Hitler. My mother’s family, her aunt, went to Auschwitz and a couple other places. And she wasn’t Jewish, but she was captured and thrown in with everybody else and went through some pretty heavy shit. So all of the stories I had heard, and the symbol of that being Hitler, was terrifying. I knew what he was trying to do, which was show the absurdity of people who have so much power built off of insecurity and what they’re willing to do, and then just showing him as an imbecile. As a kid that was an important thing to see, because it took the mickey out of something that was incredibly terrifying. I don’t think any other film can really touch what he did, and I don’t think you can really do that again. It was a first in a way, and there is not really a comparable thing in history that’s so singular that you could make fun of. So I think for me, as a kid, it was nice to know that you could disarm something so terrible. I was a huge Charlie Chaplin fan, and I loved seeing all of his slapstick comedy, but that one did me in."