"A little like David Bowie and his influence, with me being a teenager during the 70s meant I never stopped being affected by Brian's music. If you were a big Brian fan, you would get into a cast of characters - be it T. Rex or Roxy Music or Bowie - and you followed the connections of those artists. Eno managed to stay really intriguing. When Eno's first album - Here Come The Warm Jets - came out, it was a record you only had if you were in the know. It was obscure and underground but I had never gotten into it. I had a couple of friends who were Roxy freaks and bought everything and anything to do with the band and I had a best mate who was obsessed with Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and was playing it all the time. I got to know it really well and it has connected to a lot of records that I like. Arguably, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) was the blueprint for Wire. It was the blueprint for David Bowie's later records and you can hear the proto-Talking Heads on that record. People forget that Eno was omnipresent in the late 70s on collaborations with Bowie, Talking Heads and Devo. If you listen to Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) that makes complete sense. It sounds like all of those bands four or five years before they made similar stuff. 'The True Wheel' sounds like something off Scary Monsters and it is four or five years before. 'Third Uncle' sounds like Talking Heads many years before - so make of that what you will. The idea of using the studio as an instrument, which has become commonplace now with people in their rooms on GarageBand, was a real innovation when Eno was doing it. There was no one else like him at the time. But, it is all about the listening experience and, like the Wire album, when I heard Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and listened to it a lot, it was everything rock music hadn't been up until then. I was making note of that - it was anti-blues, it was anti-rock and it was anti-faux authenticity. It was a long, long way away from Laurel Canyon."

"I can remember being introduced to this album at a very specific moment. I went round to my friend's house, and I think my sister had the CD and put it on, and I heard the introduction to 'Lithium' and those drums and I just thought: ""What the hell is this?"" It was the most exciting thing I'd ever heard. It was like that for a lot of people of course, I was no different. But it was very shortly after we heard that that my friend got a drum kit and my brother got a guitar, and my brother had a bass, and I knew that all I had to do was pick up that bass and we had a band. Nirvana were a three-piece and there were three of us. You didn't have to play very well, and you could play the same thing quietly and then play it loudly and that was kind of a revelation for a little kid. That was all Nirvana ever did and created the most amazing feelings with it. It was a very powerful thing to put into the hands of a little teenager. It's really easy to get together. You just all need to play the same thing on these three instruments and it will work, and you will sound like a band and that's so empowering. In terms of my musical style, Cobain has a really good way with melody and he doesn't really sing very obvious things. He always comes down on the major or minor third of a chord, and it really colours the music both positively and negatively in a way that not a lot of melodies do. The aggression in it and the fact that it can be tender in one moment and then the opposite the next is something which happens in my music. The emotional intensity of Nirvana is something which I definitely think my band is probably guilty of, in terms of high emotional stuff happening. They are really interesting, just in terms of the fact that there's so much depth in it, despite it being very simple, and the lyrics don't actually mean anything, and yet you can get so affected by Nirvana in such a strange way - not necessarily just because of Kurt's story, but because there is something in the music and it's very difficult to describe."