"It's just a gorgeous record with, again, a big heart in the middle of it. If you were to choose a tune to listen to, I'd listen to 'Lullaby' at the end of the record. Rolf Klausener's mother escaped an abusive childhood in Honduras. Her mother died in childbirth, and as she was brought up, she was abused, and she made an escape which involved crossing a swollen river, where she was rescued from drowning by a complete stranger whose face she never saw. He only found this out because his father died unexpectedly young and he realised he wanted to know more about his dad. He thought he should interview his mother because he didn't remember much about him. Then all this stuff came pouring out. Glory Hope Mountain is kind of a westernisation of his mother's name, Gloria Esperanza Montoya, and on the front sleeve there's a very saucy picture of a young woman. That's his mother. It was sent to me from Bella Union as part of my radio programme for Radio 6 Music. I've read a million promo stickers, as I'm sure you have, and they nearly always say fucking ""eclectic"" right? But the first time I saw this album, I thought this is about something, you know, and I thought it was such a bold step. It transfixed me when I first listened. I loved it so much that I invited The Acorn to tour with us in Europe, and they did. I should have picked an older, uglier band. We got absolutely no attention from women [laughs]. We became really good pals. Just really beautiful people, and an absolutely wonderful record. Just to finish what I was saying about Lullaby, he wrote it from the point of view of his grandma to his infant mother, and the lyrics are astonishing. Casey Mecija provides vocals for it – just such a beautiful voice. But the lyrics are: ""'Cause the sun set down on me You turn your head and slowly start to breathe Like the common bonds on carbon, buried deep I'm the shadow of the long forgotten dream... And the promises I never got to keep Though your toes grow colder as you sleep The blood runs through your heart with every beat… But I, I will wash over you I know your heart is true Little mountain of mine"" It's unbelievable, it is so touching, just beautiful. I challenge anyone with a beating heart not to have it broken with it. The whole album is brilliant."

"When I was about thirteen an older friend of mine made me a tape of DC hardcore. Making tapes is a lost art and I still do it, but you can get USB’s now that look like tapes. He made me a tape because I only knew Minor Threat and they were like a gateway drug for me. “This was the first song on there, it’s from the split record Void did on Dischord Records with The Faith in 1983. It’s funny, when Freddie was talking about what he liked and didn’t like, when you’re that age you’re constantly navigating through the sea of songs you actually really connect with and the ones you think you should like, because they make sense with the identity you’re trying to cultivate for yourself and I was floored by ‘Who Are You?’ “It’s everything that’s great about Punk Rock and everything that’s great about music when you’re a kid, that rage and that anger and also feeling completely misunderstood by everyone in your house, your family, your school or your hometown. I read that Kurt Cobain put this in his top 50 songs of all time and of course that makes sense, it’s a song about being misunderstood and that’s what Nirvana came to represent for another generation. “It’s Punk Rock at its best and like The Stooges song for Freddie, this really taught me that it’s not what you play it’s how you play it, as long as you’re being authentic, and Punk Rock is just authentic rock isn’t it? I was in a punk band and my first shows were in Southampton above a pub for this DIY collective called ‘STE’ - which stood for ‘Southampton, Totton and Eastleigh punk collective.’ Students got in for a quid and under 16’s got in free. It was great, there weren’t many women, but other than that it was a great way to ply your trade. “I’ll play it to you and when you hear the opening you’ll see what I mean. It’s this intro, this riff, it still excites me now, it’s just so brutal and the song’s a minute long. It’s so direct and to me it’s weirdly poppy as well, maybe I’m alone in thinking that, but it was a song that was really easy to connect with. It’s filled with rage and it’s one of those songs that you want to turn up so your parents can hear who you are and see where you are in your life."

"I saw him [The Fall's Mark E. Smith] at Shepherd's Bush last year playing the last album, and only playing new songs. It was absolutely brilliant. I just sat and watched him, he's a genuinely strange person. He doesn't fit into the stereotype of the arts school drop-out, or the working class cliché either. It's a strange place he occupies in between. Just seeing him march around the stage turning the amps down, it sounded absolutely brilliant. You can tell he's got the ability to know how to make things sound amazing in quite a simple way. I could have chosen any Fall album from that period, Wonderful & Frightening World or Bend Sinister or I Am Kurious Oranj, but I chose ...Saving Grace because it has a really personal meaning to me. I grew up with it, and when I was at Sixth Form College I really started listening to the Smiths and The Fall. I had to find out myself about The Fall. I remember reading about them somewhere and going down to the record shop and buying a Fall record blind. Listening back, it's got some nonsense on it, like all his records. It's not some perfect artefact, there's something very instinctive about it. I love the track 'Paintwork'. As soon as I heard the track I assumed it was autobiographical, it's about the way he messes the music up. I can imagine the musicians saying, 'It's Mark, messing up the paintwork', but what they don't get is that that's the beauty of it, that he is messing up the paintwork, and the track in itself is strangely autobiographical because suddenly someone presses a tape recorder in the middle. He was always a huge, huge influence for me, growing up and then in Suede. You can't actually hear it in Suede, but we were massive fans, Justine and I especially, we were obsessed. When Matt, Justine or I were just mucking around we wrote the song 'Implement Yeah!', which was a sort of comedy song about him. Then there was the Fall song 'Glam-Racket', which the NME or someone said was about us. Who knows what anyone's songs are about, let alone Mark E. Smith songs? I think it was a timing thing: it came out in 1993, and people just assumed it was a criticism of Suede. Mark E. Smith's too smart to write a criticism of anyone, apart from people he's been in a band with. A great artist utterly defines their own genre, and that's what Mark E. Smith's done. He's got a patent on that sound."

"This was probably the most important pop album for me in that I think it's the moment where I realised that I could be a musician. It was partly that this band was semi-non-musicians, but it was also because the songs borrowed a lot from what I knew about experimental music at the time. I'd been playing experimental music with various outfits in England and with Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff and all these people that had come over from America to visit us, 32 people who were into the experimental music scene in England. La Monte Young was one of the big figures in everybody's cosmology at the time and The Velvets, both Lou [Reed] and John [Cale], had worked with La Monte. So the first album came out, I thought, ""Fantastic, amazing."" Second album I thought, ""Great, amazing."" But the third album was the one that really killed me. The first album was quite wild and dark and weird, the second album was mad and intense. But the third album was so gentle and beautiful, but because you knew their history there was that undertone of violence and rage, something trying to burst out. Even on the love songs on this – and many of them are love songs – you hear that real tension. What made me think I could do it too was that the songs were simple and the playing was so simple. There's very little artifice at all in this. But also the mood was something that I thought I could kind of connect to. The difficult thing about pop music as I was growing up, and I was 20, I think, when I first heard this, was that it dealt with young teenage emotions mostly, and that just wasn't interesting to me. I loved the music but what the songs were about was sort of childish and it was all about 'me' and 'you' and 'love', and I just wasn't interested in that really. At the same time I'd been working with Cornelius Cardew and all these kind of quite heavyweight experimental composers. But I didn't want just that. I wanted that [pop music] and that [experimental]. So I was always looking for anywhere that somebody was making some blends that started to be interesting. I didn't own this record for years and years. I just didn't buy this album because I never wanted it to become casual for me. I bought this one about five years ago. I never owned it before then. I would only hear it at other people's places because I always wanted it to be special."

"This era of the Velvet Underground is possibly, along with Ray Davies, my favourite kind of singing. It’s sort of weedy and again without testosterone and certainly without force, it was just very, very hip and not trying too hard. It’s interesting, because did a band ever sound as hip, not trying, but still delivering? “Velvet Underground were a real staple of my generation, in that a bunch of kids in the mid-70s’ discovered them retrospectively, probably in a way that I’d imagine kids now discover The Smiths. They sounded genuinely subversive without being obscure, they were real, proper songs and there was a great poetry in there. “Often when you talk about songs to people, most people assume you’re talking about the words - to a lot of people that’s what a song is. But because I got so obsessed so young with the mechanics of the music, the production and how things came together, often I wasn’t really too bothered if the words didn’t make much sense. I’ve had amazing experiences with songs that had words that absolutely didn’t make any sense, like ‘Jeepster’. “‘Foggy Notion’ is a really good example of a song that’s just really rocking - the guitar is really hyped up and swings like crazy - that makes you feel really good and absolutely doesn’t need any serious lyrical content. In fact, sometimes - and I suspect it’s the case with ‘Foggy Notion’ because I know it so well - if the lyrics were snagging your attention too much it would distract from what it’s supposed to do. You’ve got to remember it was for young people in the 60s’ to Frug to, doing these dance moves in cool striped-shirts and cool shades and ‘Foggy Notion’ is all about that and the sound of the voice. I think that’s a great thing and something people who think songs are entirely about meaning and words aren’t aware of. “It’s an interesting thing with The Velvet Underground, because if you imagine The Rolling Stones back then, who were supposedly the baddest of the bad boys and The Beatles who were supposed to be the hippest and most worldly, I wonder what they made of The Velvets at the time or if they’d heard them. I know Dylan was aware of them, but writing songs like ‘Heroin’ and ‘The Black Angel's Death Song’, I wonder if you were in The Beatles or The Stones you were just going ‘Oh no, we’re so X-Factor.’"

"I think “Pure” is a song that changed my life more than any other. I’d never really sung before or written any lyrics entirely by myself and it was kind of a first attempt. “To put it into context, at that time in Liverpool loads of bands were being signed by record companies and being given big deals. Bands like The La’s were all doing gigs and that’s how they got signed, but I couldn’t really do a gig because I didn’t have a band, so I just had my tunes. “I recorded about three or four tunes at home and during bits of downtime in a studio I produced in. It was a very tentative try, but there was a publisher guy who said, ‘I’d love to hear those songs’ and I played them to him and he said ‘We should put this out’. I said, ‘I don’t have a group and we haven’t got a label’ and he basically got some copies printed up and put it out. “We had 500 copies pressed and released it through an indie label called Ghetto and nobody expected much to happen. I thought at least I would be getting a song out there, so it was very much an underdog type thing. “Pure” just hung around and then people started noticing it - we’d sell a few hundred copies and then they’d get some more made. Then DJ’s on stations started playing it and it was a very word of mouth thing. In the end John Peel played it a few times and spoke about it, but nobody really knew what it was, because nobody had seen us play. “It culminated in me getting a call from someone in America. This station in LA called K Rock phoned me in my Liverpool flat and said, ‘Your record is the most requested record in California for the last two months.’ It was like fairy story, and then they pressed up a load more, we finished the album and it was the start of The Lightning Seeds. “That song had a massive part to play for me in the whole way my life and career went. It was a brilliant moment and it started everything. I’d always thought that music was a form of magic, or alchemy or something and the idea that I could record this song in the top room of my house on a tape machine and that it could go out across the world seemed mad to me. I couldn’t believe it."