"The Kinks, like The Who, are one of those quintessentially great English singles bands but I’ve listened to this album so many times and I just fucking love it. It’s obviously such a big influence on Damon Albarn’s writing. You know the song ‘Big Sky’? 'Big sky, too big to cry.' You can almost hear someone shouting 'Parklife!' at the end of it, do you know what I mean? On the opening track you’ve got the lyrics mentioning all the strawberry jam, Fu Manchu, Mrs Mop and all this quintessentially English stuff, and when I started getting older so I was listening to records not just feeling them it suddenly hit me, 'These lyrics are fucking outrageous. How do you get all that stuff in there and make it work?' The album is incredible. I’ve got an old album of interviews with Ray Davies and he was saying that he thought it was important that we keep all of this traditional stuff like afternoon tea, cricket and cucumber sandwiches alive because American culture was taking over the world but he couldn’t imagine it taking over England. But then you realise… oh shit… it did. What a cunt. What a cunt. It took ages to come out because of legal shit, got delayed for three years and then no one bought it. I presented him with an award a few years ago and I thought, now’s my chance to get to know more about the writing of such a great album. So I was like, 'So Village Green, tell me about this great album…' And he’s grumpy at the best of times and just went: [snaps] 'Oh, I don’t know.' I was like, 'Ok, good to get that one sorted out finally. Nice to meet you.'"

"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."

"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."