"My first girlfriend used to listen to Joni Mitchell, and the album that she got me into was Court And Spark. I was 15 or 16 when I first heard it, and the acoustic playing is more like a jazzy sort of thing. I found that really cool. “I love her style as a guitarist, and I love the songs on that album, too. They’re quite funny, and they put you in a certain mood, like Free Man In Paris and People’s Parties. I like it a lot more than Blue and a lot more than Hejira, and the other ones that people go on about. It’s just really good. “Nick Drake’s Pink Moon [1972] also deserves a mention as a very important acoustic album for me. Can we have it as a bonus record?"

"… the first time I owned an album of my very own. I didn't pay for it with my pocket money, my sister Clare got given it by a boyfriend and she passed it on to me immediately. The Hipgnosis cover with the black and gold solarisation and the amp - it's a classic record sleeve. It's just a really brilliant album, a bridging album between the Tyrannosaurus Rex years and the full-on commerciality of Fly, and 'Telegram Sam' and 'Hot Love'. There's a great poster of Marc looking supercool in his Maida Vale flat with a mirror in the shape of a guitar, and illustrations of him by George Underwood, who famously went to school with David Bowie and punched him in the eye, causing 'the Bowie eye'."

"I love this album. We used to play these tunes in The Idle Race; about two or three songs off that album. For about a year we did them and they were so good to play. That big, rough r'n'b sound. I’ve actually recorded ‘Mercy, Mercy’ on my new album, Longwave. It’s a version like we used to do it – just two guitars, drums and bass and background shouting. It sounds like the old record, really. I think that sound was important back then. There was a lot of r'n'b going on. Obviously, you had The Spencer Davis Group with Steve Winwood, who I love – he’s a brilliant guy. He’s one guy I’d like to work with one day. I haven’t seen him for a few years but we used to hang out a bit."

" The ten-year, ten-album career of Felt divides neatly in halves: with rococo lead guitarist Maurice Deebank and without. This is his last album with the band, and the first with equally hyperactive organist Martin Duffy (probably not a coincidence). The effect is like Yes if Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman just kept soloing, under and over the vocals and each other. And, the album is produced by Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie, who flanges almost everything, hard, almost all the time. The centerpiece is the inscrutable and euphoric 'Primitive Painters'; on it there are two lead vocals (generally undecipherable), an ever-soloing guitarist, a usually soloing organist, all swimming in flangers, and then the bassist starts soloing too, and it's probably the best pop single of the 80s."

"This was a huge album amongst me and my friends. It was kind of the soundtrack to ten years of my life. From high school, through uni and then right out of uni was all soundtracked by that record really. It was the Bible in terms of hip-hop. It was one of the first introductions to hip-hop of mainstream appeal. It was so full of bangers. It's overly long and the production… well, it's Dre, isn't it? Anything from it is so ingrained in my generation. I'm always happy to hear this album which I think is the true sign of a good album. Although I wouldn't be so pleased to hear Kid A, because it doesn't have that same mood. 2001 has that 'all moods covered' thing going on."