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Initially, the song had a middle section that went: “Don’t feel let down. Don’t get hung up. We do what we can – do what we must.” But it was pathetic. We knew it needed something else. Just as we were discussing this, our secretary Kathy popped her head round the door to tell us someone was on the phone. Lol heard her voice and said: “What about Kathy?” She took some persuading, but he got her to speak the words: “Be quiet, big boys don’t cry.” It was beautiful.

What is jazz to you? Is it the slightly irregular rhythms? The familiar sound of an upright bass? Or is it the freedom to interpret and improvise? Naturally, there is no single answer to this question. By its nature, jazz evades strict definition — especially when its influence is so enormous, and “what jazz was” has since transformed into hundreds of different styles and genres.

In the beginning, composing would consist of sitting down at the keyboard and writing out the musical scale or the musical progressions or melodies. Now, I more or less find a scale or a mode or a harmonic atmosphere, especially with open tuned zithers. I will drop into a more focused, meditative state and let feeling wash up and let that tuning of the zither reflect that mood. I let the music just unfold without thinking of where it is going to go. It's more of a free flow, spontaneous, trusting, intuitive way of composing.

One of the reasons my new change of pace came about was that even when I was trying to do dancefloor tracks, that’s not really where my head was at. They always meander a bit too much to the melodic side, and you’re really trying to run that dancefloor from behind the decks, those tracks are tough to mix in.

I think people get the wrong idea about soloing, […] as if it means you have to play a lot of notes. It means you have more freedom to put more feelings through your music.

Whereas an accepted origin story is hard to ascertain, the tipping point when beat tapes move out of the confines of studios, cars and producers’ hands and into more public ears is easier to establish. It happened in the early-to-mid ’00s, and it involves the internet, CD-Rs and two kindred spirits: Madlib and Jay Dee. Willingly or not, these two changed the beat tape game forever.

Cassettes instantly seemed like the perfect medium to release music on. Now that the masses are experiencing music digitally via downloads or streaming, who cares about a Compact Disc? Most new desktop computers and laptops are now shipping without CD drives. Vinyl is great, but it’s expensive to produce and bulky.

The simple lyric from his 1999 album, “I sincerely want to f**k the taste out of your mouth”, for me, puts this beyond reasonable doubt. It’s through these sexually proactive, perverse and often humorous stories that Prince has opened up a different idea of sex. Through his carnal lyrics he invites men to imagine a different way of relating to women, and in return invites women to imagine the possibilities of men who imagine such things.

With Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums we knew we had certain songs that we were going to try and use in the film, so it sort of becomes a bit of a game to use as many of them as we can. I think one of the reasons why the work Wes and I have done together on the music side of things has been as potent as it has been is that we spend a lot of time between movies thinking about the music.

I like meeting other artists, but they rarely impress me. Regular people do, people who aren’t playing power games. I know power plays immediately and I’m better at it than most of them, so I discount them in a flash.

Yeah, we’ve been doing that for a while, that’s for sure… At the time (TTC & early Institubes parties) we were blending bits of dirty South, R&B, ghettotech and techno, because to us it was all the same music. That was almost our motto. But we were conscious that people weren’t ready for that yet, ha ha. I’m not surprised that it took so long to happen on a larger scale because music had been divided for a while into genres and scenes that weren’t supposed to merge. I guess the recent dub step / trap / dirty south comeback thing made the connection between hip hop and dance music more obvious. It’s all club music now.