"""My favourite Julian Cope is loose Julian Cope. Back in the day, I was already a fan of his, because of World Shut Your Mouth and Saint Julian; those were great records, not super loose, but very rock and roll. Then, he put out My Nation Underground, which I was pretty dissatisfied with. It had its moments, but it was too produced, and so '80s. I think even he’s disowned that one now. ""After that, I’d be surprised, because I’d be going to the record store and he’d be putting out these albums with no announcement. One of them was Skellington, which this song is from. That record was huge for me, to the point that I named one of my early bands after it. Droolian came after that and it just felt like, when he really hit his peak with Peggy Suicide and Jehovahkill, it was those previous two albums that really laid the groundwork. ""They were totally loose and off the cuff, he was mumbling the lyrics and the liner notes said that he hadn’t ever really finished them. They’re not commercial records and that made them all the more fascinating to me. They’re more human. It was a lesson - not every record has to be polished. You don’t need to appeal to everyone who’s known you up until then. It’s good to throw up the occasional roadblock. ""Plus, at that moment in time, he was doing the whole “Being a rock star” thing better than anybody else. I hung off of anything he had to say; it felt like nothing he was saying wasn’t extraordinary. I mean, the title of the song says it all. He's just an amazing character."

"Andy might have been cheating a little bit by picking two Pogues songs, and I might be doing the same with this, because it’s just under an hour long. I’m getting my money’s worth out of my three picks! “The first time I heard this track was when it was sampled by an Italian house band called Sueño Latino in the late 80s’. Their version had more of a four-on-the-floor kick to it, so you could dance to it and that’s where I first heard it, in Ibiza way back. It really spoke to me straight away; I couldn’t pinpoint any of the sounds and it felt as if it came from the future. It had this Balearic, soulful feel to it and yet it was electronic. It was about as far out a piece of music as I’d experienced and it seemed totally unique at the time. “I slowly unravelled it and got back to the original by Manuel Göttsching, which is just mind-blowing. It goes back to the days of those electronic concept albums. I read somewhere that it wasn’t ever supposed to be released, that he just made it for himself so that he had something to listen to on long-haul flights - which is the kind of self-indulgence you expect from a German electronic pioneer! “I love that it has so much soul and yet it still doesn’t sound as if it’s of this world. It’s a total shapeshifter and there’s still an intoxicating sense of escapism about it for me, which is something I’m always chasing in my own work. Like the Beck and Smiths songs, it was a track that had a profound effect on me, and made me think, “I want to learn how to do that, or at least try. I want to live in that world."

"One of the greatest gifts I’ve even been given was when someone told me to check out Blue Nile. It’s extraordinary, they are such a great band. And you feel like you’re part of a little club once you get to know their music. They don’t get name checked very often, but I remember Guy Garvey mentioned them when he was picking up an award for Elbow and it’s like, you’re looking out for someone who knows their music and when you find them you have an immediate jumping off point. Hats has got that emotional element. It’s got a song called 'The Downtown Lights' - I’ve got to be careful not to say every song I mention here’s the great song I’ve ever heard, but 'The Downtown Lights' is certainly up there. What I like about Paul Buchanan’s writing is that his songs are like atmospherics or they’re kind of analogous. They don’t kind of necessarily describe situations very directly but he frames them in a different way. 'The Downtown Lights' is a great example, I suppose it’s saying that he wants companionship and that the world of the downtown lights and the busy streets and all of that stuff is a kind of representation of what it’s like when he’s with whoever he’s trying to describe in the story of the song. To frame a love song like that is really interesting. The production’s interesting with them as well - sometimes I wonder if people are put off by that. Especially the 80s stuff, it can be very synth-y and almost, it’s almost, really super middle-of-the-road! There’s something about it that can be really obvious but once you get into it, it’s the greatest gift because the lyrics are so subtle and nuanced. It’s something I revisit when I’m in a reflective or nostalgic mood."

"Discharge do write short pop songs. They're like punk rock haiku. I love Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing and still listen to it regularly. To me it's not only a great punk rock record it's also a very psychedelic record, which may not seem normal to most people. Of all the records I ever listened to while tripping on acid, this is the one that sounded the best. You'd think with the lyrics and the cover that it would be a scary proposition. It was more like getting wrapped up in the sound. The guitars sounded like they were in a hall of mirrors, there are so many layers bouncing back and forth. You can almost kind of view the whole record as one long song, or a piece with these little movements. I've obviously thought about it way too much while tripping on acid! From that era - the early 80s - I was really into Discharge, Crass, Zounds, some of the other Crass bands, but a lot of the other stuff like Peter And The Test Tube Babies seemed really dumb to me and weak. I didn't get into Oi! bands. They'd tend to have these dumb singalong choruses and chanting and the guitar parts always seemed to be like ""the box"" - a four-fret pattern. Of course I loved a lot of the earlier UK punk rock bands. That's a problem with these lists where you have to think of thirteen albums. I can't fit The Damned in there, I can't fit Pere Ubu. I could but I'd have to take something out and all these records are equally important to me. It's like choosing between children or favourite grandparents!"

"I’m going to end this list with a request that you also seek out Kurosawa’s Dreams after you see this movie. Dreams is my absolute favorite film of all time, and when you bookend it with Ikiru, the experience is quite amazing. Ikiru is the story of a long-tenured public servant who discovers he only has a year to live. He makes a last-ditch effort to bring meaning to his existence by working tirelessly to build a children’s playground. It is the work of an artist feeling he has not done enough substantive work in his life—a romanticized notion that our daily routine is often meaningless save for a few charitable acts. It is our fears as a young mind. Over the years, Kurosawa would endure a tumultuous career that nearly ended in an act of attempted suicide. Now consider Dreams, a film coproduced by Steven Spielberg and featuring Martin Scorsese in a cameo as Vincent Van Gogh. These filmmakers, along with George Lucas, would rally behind Kurosawa in the ’80s and help him make a comeback with Kagemusha and Ran (both on Criterion), winning him a Palme d’Or and an Academy Award nomination while also bringing back to light his incomparable portfolio of works (Lucas would very often recount how The Hidden Fortress was the narrative inspiration for Star Wars). Dreams, to me, feels a bit like a representation of the playground that Kurosawa built through his works, and the children he inspired coming out to thank him for it. I can watch this movie again and again forever. Criterion has an amazing collection of twenty-five films by Kurosawa. I cannot recommend watching his entire body of work highly enough, as it is perhaps the best documentation of a commercial artist in the modern age."

"This was the basis for the baseline in Sleaford Mods, fucking great stuff. Stuff like 'The Lurch'. They did a cover of the Gun Club's 'Sex Beat', that's great. Most of Weatherall's work is bass heavy, it's solo stuff. Wrong Meeting, the album that came after this, that's bass-led. There's a rockabilly feel to it. But with From The Double Gone Chapel it's 80s synths, bass, car alarms. The inner sleeve, which is just a coffee stain and a packet of Marlboro Lights next to it, that really influenced me. Same with Mike Skinner's sleeve where he's just sat in his flat with a pint, it's just fucking brilliant. That's how it is, he's not pretending to be anything. Those things merge, all of it is a big melting pot. I think I've hit it good with the albums that I have chosen for you as far as my contribution to Sleaford Mods. I mean, Andrew, whatever he makes, I go with. Initially, when we started doing Wank, the album before Austerity Dogs, I would have said to Andrew that I want a big heavy bass and I want a dusty Wu Tang thing. He took that on board and made it his own, then he would bring these slices of music to me and I thought the sound wasn't something I'd really go for, but it was quite good. I don't tell him anything any more, he just gets on with it. This the band I've been trying so hard to get into. I think we've been very lucky, regardless of the hard work and the shit me and Andrew went through, it was luck as well. I feel quite grateful that it happened to us."

"The avant-garde comes to the mainstream. At the time, Terry Riley was an avant-garde composer. He still is, but he's probably more so known for his work in the late '60s. Indian music at the time was coming into focus because of The Beatles and psychedelic music. So his compositions - especially this one - were really hypnotic, very mantra-esque. I think Terry Riley influenced more in a pop sense than in a rock sense, and I think A Rainbow In Curved Air has probably equal influence to Sgt. Pepper's. And you can quote me on that! It's obviously where The Who got the name 'Baba O'Riley', where the band used synthesisers - that's from Terry Riley. We cut our teeth in Buffalo, NY, in the early '80s and in that time the place was at the height of avant-garde. They opened a music school where they featured all the greats - Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Tony Conrad - just a ton of avant-garde composers, who later became more famous. It was such a central point for the electronic avant-garde movement, one that hadn't been around since San Francisco in the late '60s. It influences everything that Grasshopper and I do. We have strange polarities of the melancholy, romantic side of us. Then we also have the avant-garde side of us. The rock & roll side of us is probably the least prominent in our music. One of our albums, Snowflake Midnight, is also our homage to that bygone era of electronic music. Once you put it on, you think, ""Oh that's where all that William Orbit and Moby stuff comes from."" If you look all the way back, that's Terry Riley. It was the beginning of synthesisers, arpeggio synths also, which eventually became modern dance music. It was his motif of making it more hypnotic."

"When you ask me about whether this was an influence, the first thing that comes to my mind is Philadelphia, more than Motown. Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and Barry White, and that kind of sound. Certainly after our third album, A New Flame, that was very much influenced by Philadelphia. I found it very difficult to be influenced by Motown, because the sound of Motown was so unique that Stewart [Levine] and I, we very much backed away from it. By the mid-80s, that 60s Motown sound was a big cliché, and we wanted to make something more modern. But then again, that's what What's Going On is. It's the album that took Motown away from what you might describe as the 45 sound, singles sound, of The Supremes and The Four Tops. The What's Going On album was one of those mind-expanding records, wasn't it? It blew Stevie Wonder's mind and inspired him to make Music of My Mind and Innervisions. It had an impact on everybody. And I know that Berry Gordy thought it was a failure initially, so he got his comeuppance from the sheer genius of it. Again, it's an album to listen to from beginning to end. In fact it makes you do that because the tracks, they don't really end, they just drift into another track. It's one of those moments of genius when everything came together – the engineering, the band, the songs – he just really hit something. I was torn between Let's Get It On and this, that's also a great album, for many years I preferred it; but as I've gotten older, I've come back to fully appreciate the the originality and the ground-breaking brilliance of What's Going On."