"My friend Tony recommended Jolie Holland. I'd never heard it. He heard it through his girlfriend, and he said, ""This has been made in a bedroom and it's beautiful."" She even coughs in the middle of a song, she does: ""All the morning birds"", she hits a beautiful, fluty high note and then clears her throat and she just left that recording the way it was. I was so into it, much like the Chet Baker record. It's just a singular mood. You put the whole album on and drift off into her world for a bit with her. And it is literally a bedroom musing. And then I found out it was one of Tom Waits's favourite records. That was validation to my opinion, and I just loved it. Then when I came to making my solo record, very nervous but on a whim, I contacted Jolie and said: ""There is no one on earth I'd rather do a duet with, and I know you don't know me from Adam, but any chance?"" And she got back and she said, ""I'd love too"", and we recorded 'Electricity' together, which was great. We were both conducting transatlantic love affairs at the time, and I'm obsessed with the transatlantic phone cable, what it took to lay it. It's 3,000 miles, it's 10-feet thick cable, and every time it snapped they had to start again. The way they did it, it was steamships in those days, so paddle steamers in effect. Two steamers met mid-Atlantic and circled each other, while attaching their halves of the cable together. And then took off in different directions, that's how it happened. And there was a huge fuss when it was connected. Everybody celebrating. Imagine the money involved in the endeavour, because every time it snapped that it, you've lost the cable, you've got to start again. When it arrived in New York and in England, of course both sides celebrating wildly; in actual fact, it stopped working after a couple of days. These endeavours were fresh in my head at the time, so Jolie and I wrote a song called 'Electricity', which is about precisely that, conducting a love affair transatlantically. My favourite bit being I said to her at one point: ""What haven't we said that you always say on a long-distance phone call?"" And she said, ""'What are you wearing?'"" And I said, it's got to go in, but you're singing it [laughs]."

"Sgt Pepper’s was my childhood Beatles record. Again, it’s moving, but in quite an abstract way, just describing what she’s leaving behind. You don’t ever hear where she’s gone or why, but you get these little hints: she’s leaving home after living alone and yet her Mum and Dad are there. It’s all done with McCartney’s jovial style but it’s got this sadness in it, which I think he’s really good at - he’s done it lots of times, with ‘Eleanor Rigby’ being the absolute epitome of it. “But that whole album made an impact on me as a kid. It’s a kind of dark, sickly-feeling album to me. It’s not very comfortable, it’s trippy and weird. You don’t really know where you are with it, it’s colourful, but in a ghoulish way. It’s a scary record for a child, because it’s just so weird. And ‘She’s Leaving Home’ holds you a bit closer than the other songs I think, even though it’s about someone leaving home. I also like the musical elements - the melody and the structure of it. “The Beatles have been an ongoing influence in my life and I think if you like them as a child you’re always going to like them. But the great thing about The Beatles is the breadth and the evolution of their records, if you’re not feeling ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ anymore, you can dip in at different points and find different sides to them. ""There’s so many things they touched on. ‘Helter Skelter’ is basically the whole of The Who’s output in one song; the post-rock elements of ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, that’s a fucking genre now! And they just did it for a laugh and never did it again. There’s so many little flashes like that and more than anything it just makes me feel like it would have been so amazing to have been around in a time when nothing’s been done. “The other great thing about the Beatles was that they put stuff on those records specifically for children, tracks like ‘Octopus’s Garden’. I think that’s something that’s been completely lost now, because children are given adult themes in a friend way now, rather than saying, “Here’s something you might actually like, being a child. Don’t worry about the other stuff.” Although funnily enough, with Get To Heaven we got so many people telling us that their children really liked it. We were really pleased about that - maybe it’s the colourful nature of it. It’s definitely something I want to explore more."

"I picked this mainly because most people are probably familiar with the regular three studio records that came out. I would hope they are. This record, Hendrix In The West, is a compilation of live versions. I think four songs are from this San Diego show in 1969 and shortly after that tour Noel Redding was out of the band so it was the last part of the Experience. There's a version of 'Spanish Castle Magic' on the record that is just so incredible, and the bass is distorted and driving. That song alone is worth the whole record. And if you can get your hands on it, there's actually a bootleg of that whole San Diego show and I recommend that, but Hendrix In The West is a little more accessible. My friend Darren who was the drummer in Mr. Epp, we were in high school and he had one of those portable eight-track players. I think he pretty much only had three eight-tracks I can remember, and one was Jimi Hendrix's Smash Hits and another was The Who: Live At Leeds and we would play those constantly. I've always been really impressed by Mitch Mitchell's drumming. It spoke to me. I think he's maybe the best drummer in rock & roll. I just love that kind of loose, fluid feel. It's not stiff, there's sort of a jazz thing going through it. It's really propulsive. Have you ever seen 'Message To Love', the Isle of Wight set that Hendrix plays? It's weird what happened to Mitch Mitchell over the years he was playing with Hendrix. In the early days he's sitting upright and playing like he does on the records but by that almost last performance he's got a double kick drum which he's just slumped over and his back is hunched and he's really low. It's like he isn't playing the beats at all, he's just playing around it. It's like he's become a rock version of Elvin Jones - it's crazy. Rock & roll has taken its toll on a lot of people. There's a bit in the Isle of Wight thing where a couple of songs in, Hendrix just goes behind the speakers and you can hear his guitar hitting shit. And he comes back out and he's on fire. The song ends and he says "I just woke up two minutes ago!" I was like: "Gee, I wonder what he was doing back there?""