"So the The Wolf King Of L.A. and There's A Riot Goin' On were both recorded in the same studio. John Phillips bought Jeanette McDonald, a Hollywood actress, a mansion in Bel Air. And he illegally built a studio in the attic, which was huge. I guess there were building restrictions, but he just wanted to build a recording studio in there. He recorded the album in that place. Now coming on to the transcendent, joyous, pop glory of The Mamas & The Papas, The Wolf King Of L.A. is a very strange album. I think John was hanging out with Gram Parsons and as a result, the record is a country-soul-pop album. In The Mamas & The Papas, he was writing for a pop audience and I guess that was a message to Michelle Phillips because they're both adulterers, I think. John would write a song and get Denny Doherty to sing it because he knew he was having an affair with his wife. John was quite a dark guy! They were very personal songs, but also universal because he was writing for a pop audience. But with Wolf King, he went solo. Phillips became deeply addicted to heroin, coke and everything else. He was a very advanced drug addict. Wolf King Of L.A. is a very soulful album. John wrote and arranged the songs for The Mamas & The Papas but his voice was hidden in the mix as Denny and Michelle had incredible voices. But on this album, it's just his voice. And I believe that the session musicians were Phil Spector's Wrecking Crew and are the same guys who played on The Mamas & The Papas records. They loved John Phillips and thought he was a fucking great guy. It's one of those records I haven't stopped playing for 30 years and a great document of rock and LA culture in the late '60s. It's also got a great cover with John wearing a top hat standing on Malibu beach with the sun setting looking absolutely wasted."

"The thing about this band is that it came out of a grunge background, obviously Dave [Grohl] came out of Nirvana. But he can play guitar just as well or better than Kurt, sings great. The most interesting thing I find about Foo Fighters, and songs like 'My Hero', is that they are based in pop melodies. Not based in the blues. Which is really interesting, having that big wall of sound guitar thing with pop melodies and interesting lyrics. Just an interesting band. This album just has the songs and it has the attitude. You can have good songs on an album but... well I remember getting the Blur record [Blur] after hearing that 'Song 2' and I was shocked to find the rest of the record was just synths and stuff. What the fuck? You hear 'Song 2' and you think, 'Wow, that's great!' and then you hear the rest of the album and it's like REEEEOOW REEEOW. It's like The Communards or something. Almost disco electronica or something. So, you know, consistency is not just a big word like gymnasium, you want an album to make a statement song after song. Maybe the most consistent band is AC/DC. Song after song could almost be the same song. There is a great interview with Angus where a critic says, 'I don't want to insult you, but I think your new record sounded just like your last record', and Angus said: 'I don't agree. I think our new record sounds like every record we've ever made.' Sometimes the biggest criticism you can make can be the biggest compliment you can give. Colour is a consistent record. It makes one statement. So what that means is that they can take that music and play it live and it should sound similar to that record, consistent. I would include more if I could, but when you pick an album, it's not just a standalone item. It's about what's happening in your life, where you are and so on."

"Electric Ladyland actually would be a welcome album if it was a brand new band today. It still holds up. It was actually a pivotal record in the sense that you had a guitar player, perhaps the pre-eminent one of them all, who actually took chances in terms of songwriting. He also experimented with electronics, backing tapes and all that stuff. The reason that I know all of this is because the engineer and producer on that was a guy called Eddie Kramer who engineered some of the earlier Kiss records, and he would tell us stories and everything. A double album, it had lots of great guests on it like Dave Mason from Traffic and many others. 'Crosstown Traffic' is great, very unlike Jimi Hendrix. Noel Redding, the bass player actually auditioned as a guitar player and Hendrix told him, 'I'm actually looking for a bass player', so he had to switch over to bass right on the spot, which is why his bass playing, with a pick, is not the way that most bass players play. I was still in school when I heard it, I must have been 17 or so because I remember drawing the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the name and all that, on the cover of my notebook. In those days we used to buy albums sometimes just because of the album covers. There was an art to it, there were big hardcover books talking about the art and design of album covers and there were artists and companies like Hipgnosis and places like that which specialised in just creating album covers. For instance, on Love Gun we had a painter named Ken Kelly who painted the piece, and it was a lot of time and effort. It was an art, and sadly that's gone. Now the visuals are down to the size of a postage stamp, you don't get much. I didn't actually buy this one because of the cover. I'd bought Axis: Bold As Love because of the cover."

"This is Aaron Bruno’s solo proect. I put this on the list because I’ve been listening to it recently. I tend to find an album that is eclectic enough to keep me interested and I listen to it over and over again, obsessing over it… and then I stop. And I just stopped with this! Ha ha! Well, I’ll probably give it a bit of space and then come back to it. I try and listen to new music as much as I can, but that’s probably the first genuinely eclectic new album that I’ve enjoyed in years. The story goes that somebody in Texas played one of the album tracks and it’s caught on and everybody’s playing it now on their radio stations. And it’s become a sort of mega hit. To me there is some stuff on it that sounds like the Pixies and some stuff that sounds like The Beatles, but it’s all slightly electronic and his voice is great. There’s loads of obviously ad-libbed stuff that they’ve kept in and it’s very cool. Rough round the edges in the right way. It’s not guitar heavy, but there is some really great live drumming happening in it. I think he’s a surfing man who’s influenced by hardcore and stuff like that, but some of it’s very poppy. I think it’s just a guy who is not afraid to explore songs and take them where they feel like they should go, rather than worry about what it’s supposed to sound like. It’s the best new album I’ve heard in years."

"When I was a teenager, I would go to the library, and borrow a lot of albums that I'd read about and that came recommended. Obviously, that's an album that people tend to put in their top 100 records. I just checked it out. I was already into Prince, and I could tell that Prince had been massively influenced by them. Also, the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique was an album I liked a lot as a teenager, and some of the samples from that are from There's A Riot Goin' On. So when I did buy this album, and got it home to listen to it, it was familiar to me somehow because I'd recognise drum breaks from the Beastie Boys or clavinet parts from their records that are sampled, but I could also recognise Prince in the singing style. It's just the grooves on that record, really. There's a very lazy feel to it; there's a combination of drums with a drum machine. It was a very early record to do that. That's something I try and do a lot in my own music, and in Hot Chip."