Aladdin Sane by David Bowie

"It was the first record I ever bought with my own money. I was 12 and I chose it because of the cover: I thought David Bowie looked really cool. I loved how weird the album was: it’s a combination of avant-garde and some really great pop songs. I can listen to it endlessly and it’s still one of my favourite records. I think when I was a kid I was responding to Bowie’s androgyny but I just didn’t realise it because I was too young. There was just something about his image and the way that he presented himself that really rang true with me and I found that really exciting. I think that, for me, music is very genderless and that’s what I feel about his music specifically. When I write music it doesn’t feel like it’s restricted by any gender norms and that’s always what I look for in other artists as well."

"I would say that David Bowie had the biggest single influence on all music that came out of the time period when I started at the beginning of the 1980s. And all other bands in that modern music zone were influenced most by David Bowie. Throughout the seventies we could safely say that he pretty much owned it. If The Beatles owned the sixties, Bowie owned the seventies. I could have picked any one of his albums. I thought about Hunky Dory which I have played most, or Ziggy Stardust... which was the first album I ever bought. I thought about Station To Station which changed things as his influences morphed and then the whole Berlin trilogy which were extraordinary records. I decided on Aladdin Sane as I think it is the ultimate glam album. Musically, it was fuelled with seventies energy. Mick Ronson’s guitar work is spectacular, the tracks all have an anxiety to them – songs like ‘Cracked Actor’ and ‘Panic In Detroit’ really had an edginess. The singles ‘The Jean Genie’ and ‘Drive-In Saturday’ were probably not even the best tracks on the album – ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ is my favourite track on the album – but had an attitude. You could taste the air they were recorded in. It was the album that turned Bowie into an absolute superstar worldwide. I played it a lot when I was a kid and it was one of those records that made me want to be in a band. Also, it’s by far the greatest cover of the 1970s. The image of the flash across Bowie’s face really resonates. It’s held up – I see that the V&A museum are having a big show of Bowie’s career and memorabilia (and so they should) and the image they are using to advertise it is the front cover of Aladdin Sane."

"If I had to think of a Bowie album, then this would be the one that pinpointed when I was at my most susceptible. I would have been 14 or 15, and I just remember carrying it into school and feeling very proud to have that vinyl under my arm, and feeling very different to the other kids. The first actual album I bought was The Man Who Sold The World, which I still have a real soft spot for, but I wouldn't say it's as developed as those later albums. Everybody talks about Bowie's golden period as the early 70s, and you tend to forget about everything beyond Scary Monsters, and that's the way I feel too – I think he was by far at his most creative period at that time. It's difficult to pick one album from that period; you could have any of them from Hunky Dory to Scary Monsters. But for me, this is the record that left the biggest mark combined with my age."