"Laurie Anderson I discovered in college along with a whole other collection of artists, like Philip Glass, John Cage and Pauline Oliveros. I took an experimental music class when I was 18, which opened up this entire world of music I'd been missing. In high school I listened to Einsteurzende Neubauten and I'd pick up weird-looking found sound records from the used record bin at my local record store, but this was the first time I'd really studied it. Looking back at the vast majority of music that influenced me as a teenager, 99% of it was by boys. Before, my female influences had been Cyndi Lauper and Madonna and Alison Moyet. But Laurie Anderson was just playing an entirely different game. She was just making the bizarre music that she wanted to. She didn't need to glam up. I just remember looking at the fucking album cover of Big Science and thinking 'This is the coolest fucking woman in the world.' She looks like she gives no shit about what anyone thinks of her, in a way that surpassed Riot Grrrl or anything like that. And the fact that she had a powerhouse intellect and was a storyteller... she set a new bar in my head. She was a performance artist, which was what I wanted to be when I was 18. I imagined that I'd do something with theatre and music, probably both. I never thought as myself as any great shakes as a musician – and I still don't – but I thought of myself as a great creative performer. What Laurie Anderson and Pauline Oliveros were doing was taking the instruments they'd been taught and transmuting them into this beautiful, strange world of art. They were taking that stuff and fucking it up, and that gave me a lot of hope."

"To Bring You My Love is my favorite PJ Harvey record, I was definitely obsessed with her at that point. She was doing something with the blues that not a lot of artists that I was interested in were doing, sort of making it contemporary. That record had a very natural sound, but it also had a real style to it. It was produced. I still reference To Bring You My Love when we make records. I had really come around to Wire and Talking Heads around this time too, and I started to like that kind of abstract lyrical imagery more than literal story telling. It made it easier to write lyrics, because it was easier to hide behind. At that point, when I was writing lyrics it was all about: What can I sing that won’t embarrass me standing up there onstage? And if you could latch onto something that had a cool meaning to it, that was a bonus. But it wasn’t the primary concern. Sometimes that can lead to a lot of really bad lyrics. And a lot of it is about taste: I didn’t know a lot about what Stephen Malkmus was singing about, but it fucking worked. This is when Spoon’s first album, Telephono, came out, on Matador. In the early ’90s I started noticing that a lot of the records I liked had this Matador logo on the back: Guided by Voices, Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Liz Phair. They were the coolest label. To be able to be in the same company as those people was unreal. So, for a brief time, it was amazing—and then the record came out and nobody cared."

"He's the best frontman of all time. Iggy Pop and Nick Cave are up there for me in different ways, but Nick Cave didn't invent the stage dive. I could have picked any Stooges, but Raw Power has everything. I picked this mainly because of my love for Iggy Pop. When Post Pop Depression came out last year I fell in love with it, a collaboration between two of my favourite artists [Pop and Josh Homme], and to see this man play the Royal Albert Hall and stage diving is pretty fucking next level. It was a monumental moment. I was quite young when I first heard The Stooges. I had a couple of weird mixtapes my uncle had made. He was into stuff like The Specials but there were a few random tracks on there and the Stooges were one of them. Now, any time I have to DJ I mainly just play Iggy. He's got so many classic songs that you don't have to think about it, you can just turn to him first, a decent 40 minutes of Iggy Pop, then fill it out with whatever else you need to put in. Iggy's hits are a bit stretched out over his entire career, but Raw Power's got my favourite lyrics he's ever written. It's got the song 'Raw Power' which is just next fucking level and it's got 'Search and Destroy'. ""I'm a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm"". If you want to sum up how a man feels walking down a Hollywood street feeling like a badass, it doesn't get any better than that. The name of the album says everything you need to, it's where I took inspiration from when I was trying to come up with Modern Ruin."

"There’s a lot of albums and a lot of artists. There are bands or individuals in which the body of their work or an entire album would be big for me, but then, trying to think of just one track, I felt there should be something from Dylan, because I think he’s the greatest. That album John Wesley Harding, I might have listened to that more than any other Dylan and I still listen to it occasionally. I love it, and ‘All Along The Watchtower’ in particular. At that time, I hadn’t heard Jimi Hendrix do it or any other people do it, it was just this song. There’s something so dreamlike about it, something about it that feels mystical, even before I might have known the word mystical. It’s almost like the song is over without anything having happened. Or did it? I don’t know. I still don’t know. Did something happen? Did nothing happen? Of course, there’s the chord change and the sound of it. I love the whole album, how stripped down it all is, but with this song it’s the lyrics which really got me. It’s almost like remembering some words or images from a dream and it’s strongly felt, but then it can’t really be interpreted in the waking light. I was either at home or at a friend’s house when I first heard it and this probably adds to the magic of it. The album was really old and had been played so much when myself and one of the brothers closest to my age got it. To listen to it, there’s so many crackles and pops, it was almost like a fireplace is going. As I was listening to the music through all these crackling and pops and static, it was like listening to some really old thing that’s somehow getting transmitted to you."

"One of the first records I ever bought was Chubby Checker's 'Twistin Round The World'. He was a cultural phenomenon because the twist in those early days was a really big thing. He had an afternoon TV show every day called where he would show people how to do the twist. All it was was a green screen in those days and him doing all that stuff. I studied him, like anything else. Ernest Evans was his real name, and Kal Mann wrote those records, but the irony is that 'The Twist' was not originally recorded by Chubby Checker. It was recorded by Hank Ballard And The Midnighters, that was the original and he sounds just like Chubby. Chubby changed his name from Ernest Evans to Chubby Checker after Dick Clark's wife says, 'He reminds me of a young Fats Domino'. Fats, Chubby. Checker, Domino. Again, 'Twistin Round The World', with the globe behind it and everything, it showed me that this was a global phenomenon. That told me something. That's when I started to be aware that there are songs, then there are artists, and then there is the informational gathering of how you tell people how big you are, how famous you are. I remember later on that I saw an advertisement for Sabbath in Rolling Stone, and the ad said: 'Black Sabbath: Louder Than Led Zeppelin', I thought that was genius. It didn't say it was better, just louder. Chubby Checker had so many hits. Obviously 'The Twist', 'Let's Twist Again', 'Pony Time', 'The Fly', 'Limbo Rock', lots of stuff! He must have had 20 hits. Great music isn't just songs; it's also a social tool, like a favourite song that people used to get married or something like that."

"Lyrically Dizzee Rascal is phenomenal, and musically he's one of the most progressive, forward thinking grime artists and musicians of our time. He won the Mercury Prize over ten years [before Skepta], which says it all. This record was what I listened to when I was commuting to and from Slough, when I was just starting Gallows, I was listening to it nonstop. I've loved grime since I was young, I've always loved hip hop but grime was so quintessentially British, you couldn't have made it anywhere else. To me grime is punk, more now than ever. Punk to me was the sound of disenfranchised youth, and that's what grime is. You take everything away from young people and tell them what they can't do, at some point they're going to say 'yes we can', and that's what's happening now. They feel discriminated against and now they're making the right fucking decisions by showing that. I think it's a classic record. What's really nice to see is that back when this arrived on the scene it was still very much about beef in the grime scene, people were still writing diss tracks, whereas what's happened recently is that when he played those tenth anniversary shows you just see everybody celebrating it, celebrating the fact that here's an album that did so much over a decade ago, and now we've just had a second [grime Mercury Prize winner]. I love that, but my problem is that there haven't been more. I love that these are being used as bookmarkers, as milestones, but we need a lot more than that, more progressive, forward thinking, unique individuals. That's what the Mercury Prize is supposed to be for, though it misses more than it hits."

"Ziggy was like the entry level for me. I wasn't aware when I bought it that I was buying a concept album about a constructed creature called Ziggy Stardust. I just thought David Bowie WAS Ziggy Stardust. I must have been 12 or 13. I had a friend at school called Peter May who I sat next to, and we were both totally into the same things, like David and Marc. We both bought acoustic guitars and we'd have jamming sessions on Sunday nights at his parent's house, and I would learn the songs of both of them. It really sparked my imagination, and for a whole generation of people, Angie and David were the It couple for us. Forget about Mick [Jagger] and Bianca - that held no interest for me whatsoever, compared to Angie & David's glittering bisexual glamour. That was all a big part of it too, and that - for me - was when sexuality entered into it and I heard the word 'bisexual'. I'd heard the word 'queer' - but I'd never heard the word 'bisexual' or even an artist claiming they were. That was a huge moment for me. From Ziggy onwards, there was no looking back after that. I played truant from school to queue up to get tickets for that final tour of the Spiders, and Aladdin Sane was out by then, and I went to see him at the Liverpool Empire and it was mindblowing. And you know, Ian McCulloch, Marc Almond, Pete Burns - a whole generation of people who were to be the next wave were all there. It was an incredible world of glamour. I know they call it glam rock, but to me that was Sweet. David and Bryan [Ferry] - they were artists."