James Murphy

“When I want to DJ what I think to be the best-sounding place in the world, I go to this place in Sapporo, Japan, called Precious Hall, which has kind of a custom sound system with a much lower ceiling and a smaller room.”

“'Somebody's Calling Me' was written in my sleep, and the original was just the piano and the beat and the singing.”

“I've always been a good imitator. I love music. But I'm just not that original.”

“If I opened a record store, it wouldn't be all punk rock and esoterica.”

“I'm kind of stunned by hip-hop and R&B's embrace of what is essentially early-to-mid-Nineties Euro pop.”

“Anything that's resolvable is boring, musically. And if it's too chaotic, you don't feel tension; it's chaos.”

“I moved to New York in 1989 and went to study at NYU.”

“To me, the band is like one of my homes, in fact. It's not like, 'I've got to get out of this band. I've got to go home.' This band is home in a lot of ways. It's my closest friends; it's a place where I really feel comfortable and happy.”

“I have a very toxic combination of being completely determined, inflexible, controlling and being totally shy, guilty at hurting anyone's feelings, hypersensitive to other people's needs - and it's just paralysing.”

“My gut instincts are strong, but they're not always accessible to me, which is why I like DJing, because you don't have time, and you have to go on instinct.”

“Those early years in New Jersey were amazing. We lived in a really small town with tons of kids my age. There were fields and woods and a creek - it was a pretty ideal place to be a little kid.”

“Songs can click together really quickly, and other times, they're really laborious and heavy-lifting.”

“I don't think I've ever made a claim to startling originality.”

“One of the things that I think is special about DJing is creating this atmosphere of collectiveness, as if to say, 'We're all in this together.'”

“What we are as a live band is different to what we are on recordings, but they're both equal versions: they're both LCD Soundsystem, but in very different ways.”

“Sound sounds are terrible in the city, but it's great to listen and to walk and listen to people talk to each other. There are birds. You hear spring. I like listening to the city.”

“I wouldn't say I'm a friend of David Byrne, but I guess I'm an acquaintance. I'm obviously an admirer, and we've met, but we don't call and chat about 'Breaking Bad' or anything.”

“I was always just blown away by David Bowie and how mannered the guy was willing to be. It was so far from what I imagined someone with my confidence to be capable of.”

“I suppose what happened is that I spent my whole life wanting to be cool but eventually came to recognise the mechanism of how coolness works. So it's not really that I don't want to be cool anymore - it's more like I've come to realise that coolness doesn't exist the way I once assumed.”

“Punk rock, to me, was always outsiderness. When I first saw large-group-scene punk rock, I was repelled by it, because there were way too many people who agreed with each other.”