"Sister Lovers is one of the most beautiful records. It's probably the record I've listened to more than any other. It's just a damaged and fractured, beautiful, plaintive, poetic record. And it still retains its sense of mystery. When we first went to Memphis we met Jim Dickinson [producer] and I asked him loads of questions on how he recorded Sister Lovers. We actually went to the studios where they recorded the album twice. We were absolutely obsessed by that record. Dickinson told stories about the recording process and allowing Alex Chilton to be himself. There's no one like them in the rock canon. There's a lot of pain in the record, a howl, anguish and pain. It's the sound of defeat. But there's also a duality of victory and defeat too, which is really rare in music but it makes it so appealing and attractive. Alex Chilton could go from The Box Tops to Big Star – the first two albums were pop rock, Byrds-y commercial songs. Then, he made Sister Lovers, which was like an art record. Pure art. There's nothing commercial about it. No one would release it. It was recorded in '74 to '75 and was released in 1978, after punk. This was because he was ahead of his time. It's only in the last 15 to 20 years that people have picked up on Sister Lovers. A record like no other."

"The Marble Index is a record that sounds like no other in the history of rock. It has a dark, European, stoic atmosphere with an intensity with Nico's singing and songwriting. You have to remember that with the Velvet Underground, she had to rely on Lou Reed writing songs for her. She wasn't exactly Lou Reed or John Cale either. She wrote a song with Jim Morrison, whom she described as her soul brother, and he said she should write songs and lyrics. Nico was a very cultured lady, she worked and hung out with the Stones, she was older and had been around. In fact, I think The Marble Index is a line from a Wordsworth poem. John Cale said that nobody was quoting Wordsworth in 1968. It's one of the first art rock albums and I think that there's an intensity of vision and focus on that record, unlike any other record I've heard. I mean these are the first songs that she wrote! Where did these come from? It's so otherworldly. This album was a huge influence when we were making Screamadelica, I listened to The Marble Index all the time."

"I was just thinking last night, after I’d already sent you the list of songs, “Why didn’t I put that Lux Prima record in there?” It’s my favourite of the year so far. The first time I heard this song it knocked the wind out of me. Where did that melody come from? I’d never heard it, and yet it felt like it had existed for all eternity. By the time the track's over, it's already ingrained in you. Something else I love about this album is that it starts with a couple of songs that have you thinking that you know where the record’s going, and then it takes this hard right turn. I love that! Why don’t bands do that more often? You think of Ziggy Stardust as being this big rock record, but you forget that all of the big rock songs are saved for the back half. Side one is all soul and pop. I like that kind of sequencing, where the band is being deliberate, where they know they’re handling a piece of art. I think, with us having just put together Everything Hits at Once, I relate to that more than ever - that sense of wanting the album to gradually take the listener somewhere."

"The reason I picked ‘Philadelphia’ is because of the relatively unsung brilliance of John McGeoch on the guitar during that period, the album The Correct Use of Soap is my favourite of anything that Martin Hannett produced and again, that it came from Manchester was a huge bonus. It’s a really subjective one, for myself and my girlfriend at the time Angie, who’s now my wife, it made a soundtrack to our spring when it came out in 1980, when I was working in a clothes shop. “Every song on the record is great and no one really puts a song across in the same way as Howard Devoto, one or two people have tried, but most people wouldn’t even bother, because it’s so idiosyncratic and impossible to pull off without sounding ridiculous. I can hear Alice Cooper in there and his effect on that generation in the delivery of the vocals. There’s also the literary influences in the concepts of the songs, which are really brilliant. Whether it’s Sartre, Dostoevsky, The Situationists or feminism, whatever kind of perversity is going on there, there was a really great, mysterious manifesto in the lyrics. “It was art school that managed to rock without the need for laptops, sequencers or extra musicians onstage. They could really play but they were delivering art rock music and that’s why they’ve inspired me, especially in my solo career, on the first two records The Messenger and Playland Magazine were a really big inspiration for me and the band. “John McGeoch is someone I’m more than happy to pay tribute to and it’s only really in later years that I’ve realised what a big influence he was. The fact that he joined Public Image Ltd made total sense to me, because the other guitar player of his generation who was as inventive as him was Keith Levene. He obviously had a bit of wanderlust in him as a guitar player too, and I can relate to that!"

"I was living in Cornwall just after art college and lots of mates back home in Cardiff were really getting into kosmische stuff. One mate sent me a tape of this album. Amon Düül were a radical commune band, something which seemed a pretty out-there idea when you're living in Falmouth. I love this album, it's so varied. It's got pastoral music and very hard psych stuff on there side by side. I heard this record before hearing bands like NEU! and Cluster; it helped me get into the fact that the German bands of that post-war era had a year zero which was very appealing – by disregarding American rock & roll they created these amazing new templates. As with so many of these records, I'm drawn in by the artwork. The sleeve for Wolf City is amazing. I found out years later from Andy Votel that they created the sleeve by taking a photograph of an image created by several slide projectors overlapping onto a wall. You'd spend ages trying to get that right in Photoshop."