Frank Turner

"Um, I actually can't think of song along these lines that does much for me. Stealer's Wheel never did much after Stuck In The Middle With You, that's a great song"

"I don't really go to clubs much. I did once hear The Rat by The Walkmen in a club and it blew me away. But that's not really my scene."

"Tales Of The Deep, a song by long-defunct London band The Tailors. Adam, the singer, is a friend who taught me all about country music, and indeed, songwriting. They're a big influence on me but aren't exactly a household name."

"Cultural Amnesia might just be my favourite book of all time. It’s his essays and reflections on people he has been fascinated by, mainly from the 20th century, and I felt like I’d been properly woken up after reading it. A friend of mine actually walks Clive’s dog, so I wrote him a fan letter and my mate was able to pass it on. It was the first gushing fan letter I had written in a long, long time. I actually sent one to Henry Rollins many many years ago, and he wrote back to me. Fan letters are cool."

"Specifically his book The Clown, which is kind of like a German Catcher in the Rye and was published in the 60s. It’s an essential read and one of the my all-time favourite fiction books."

"Another music pick, this time from James who is the accordion player in The Pogues. I read his memoir, Here Comes Everybody, about half way through writing my own, and it made me go back and change some things as it was just so good. It made me really think about my own writing and how I could improve it. Even if you’re not a huge Pogues fan it’s well worth a read."

"His book, Black Coffee Blues, was probably the book that most influenced The Road Beneath My Feet. It was written between the late eighties and early nineties whilst Henry was on the road. The idea of writing an actual autobiography at my age seems quite repulsive to me, but tour diaries is a different thing as it’s not just about you but about the experiences and memories of playing shows around the world, both for you and the fans. Black Coffee Blues is the best book I’ve read like this and was a huge influence, both thematically and structurally."

"Beans On Toast is a guy called Jay and he used to run a pub in North London called Nambucca. When I was playing [gigs] in North London, I started hanging out there. Jay had this tiny little guitar and knew basically three chords, and he used to write these fun little songs about stuff that happened to us the weekend before. This was happening during the point in my life when my writing was deliberately complex and I was trying to be obtuse and challenging and all these kinds of things, so to hear that kind of simplicity both lyrically and musically was so inspirational to me. And it was so direct that it felt kind of punk in a roundabout way. I’d spent years writing these obscurantist lyrics and suddenly, here was a guy writing songs about us and our adventures and our thoughts and feelings and foibles and all the rest of it. It just knocked me sideways. When my old band Million Dead broke up, Jay was the leading light for me in terms of what I was going to do next—quite a lot of my early songs sound quite a lot like Jay, for good reason."