"Most people know Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson album, but what's interesting is that in the early '90s, he actually went into a dark, weird phase that French people don't really like. They consider his music from that time weak. But for me, it's the best. It's porn, it's queer, it's rap before that was a thing in France. It's just him mumbling obscene things on drum-and-guitar heavy production, really raw and tough. At the same time, it's poetic. The contrast is interesting: it's beautiful but dirty. On this album, Gainsbourg is hiding behind nothing. You get everything: the obsessions, the lust, the weaknesses, the scars. You see everything ugly and everything beautiful."

"It’s a throwback, but I grew up in the East Bay in Northern California. That was pretty much my first exposure to Bay area rap and I’ve just been in love with it ever since. I’ve always had love for the Bay and all that. I think that’s what started me on the tip of looking into other stuff like Mac Dre. Even Tupac is on that album. Even though E-40 is kind of mainstream, he’s always kept it underground, too. I just have fun memories of that tape with me and Kyle driving home from working at the movie theater in the middle of the night just letting that album slap in his tape deck"

"I remember the gatefold cover and I remember clearly the first time I heard it was summer and my parents opening up the doors and having friends round when I was younger. He was just the ultimate pop star and the music... it's weird when you heard something like 'Billie Jean' for the first time, that the combination of sounds - soul, electro, etc - then sounded so fresh. How he'd go from funk soul on one track, then into something really poppy. 'Thriller', the song, isn't actually my favourite. I prefer the rest of the album to it, funnily enough, but I think he made such a massive mark with this album. For me, that was his definitive statement."

"This is more for a specific time in my life. It just brings me back to a really specific couple of years. For about four or five years all I was doing was delivering pizza before we got the show. I was pizza trapping for sure. That album is exactly that, thug motivation. I wasn’t trapping I was out there slinging pizzas and that was my bible. I was thinking, ‘This isn’t it. You got to hustle.’ It was the motion picture soundtrack to not settle, keep working towards an ultimate goal. I haven’t listened to that album in a while. I have to pop it back in. That was my pizza slangin’ soundtrack."

"See I’m a Pisces so I get down with love songs. I’m totally into slow jams and old-school R&B, all that. As far as R. Kelly and Usher, all that shit is really cool, but this Best of Keith Sweat is the most flawless album. You can throw it on and every song is legit. The beats are dope. People have sampled a lot of his shit. I just think it’s probably the best album to put on and freaking make love to your woman. ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ is the track for sure. That is such a heavy bass. Celly Cel from the Bay sampled it, ‘It’s Goin Down.’ That one is legit"

"I remember listening to this when I flew to Tokyo around 2012 to promote my first solo album, Here Come The Bombs. I’d heard bits over the years – Mick Quinn was a big fan of German rock’n’roll of the mid-70s. I was on the plane listening to this, then I arrived and went for a wander around and listened to the whole thing. It really seemed to fit with the strange landscape because it’s a modern, electronic album but it’s also really organic with wobbly synthesisers and you can hear the hiss on the drum machine. I’m not sure whether they were recording quickly or it was the gear, but I like its unstable quality."

"It’s such an amazing record. I love Copenhagen on there, it just melts me. Though I said it’s hard to pinpoint influences, maybe at the end of Weird Dreams, the final track on my new album, I was doing my Scott Walker impression a bit. It’s an album I always come back to because of the mood. It’s light and dark: there’s beauty there, but the lyrics give it a real edge. You can get different things out of it. I hope I do that with my music in that it’s able to make you feel good, but if you really want to get into it you can relate to the darkness. I’m always looking for that balance."