"She takes that song 'Ain't Got No, I Got Life' and makes it so much more than a silly musical song [from Hair], she gives it emotional depth. That's the great thing about Nina Simone - she did so many Bee Gees songs - and the Bee Gees are this agreed-upon joke. I think the Bee Gees are amazing geniuses - they are just so prolific and the fact that they were able to make all these changes and keep going. They did this Beatles-esque psychedelic thing which I think is awesome and went onto becoming the kings of disco, and wrote that Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton song, 'Islands In The Stream'. Nina Simone hears a Bee Gees song or someone suggests it to her and she goes, ""That's such a sweet song - those guys have no soul at all, but I'm gonna make this song sound awesome."" What I love about that album is that it's mostly all recorded live - there's real space to it because of that. That's something we tried to do for the musical - record it live, we wanted to record it in the same room, but because there were so many elements we had to put in it was impossible. The album was recorded four days after Martin Luther King's death. I don't know how big Nina Simone really was in her lifetime, but it feels like we are lacking in politicised chanteuses right now. I think now [there's] this real era of Christian rock - people just want to be uplifted. It's kind of that dynamic thing that the critic criticises Cat Stevens for; you can probably criticise Coldplay or Mumford & Sons for the same kind of thing. Like, ""Oh you're just toying with me, you're starting all small and then making it huge, of course I have a religious feeling right now!""

"I’m a huge Oasis fan. I saw Supersonic a couple of months ago and I loved it. I like seeing Liam and Noel interact when they talk to each other because they’re clearly brothers, they go at each other and they’re funny, some of what they say is really articulate, some of it is completely at loggerheads. I remember I was in Los Angeles, heading to the studio listening to the K-Rock radio station and they said “Here’s the new song by a British band called Oasis” and ‘Live Forever’ came on and I just loved it, I turned it up really loud in the car. It’s the guitar riff and the sentiment behind the lyrics, but the second I heard Liam singing he was just going for it. He’s got one of the greatest rock voices there is, there’s a kind of sneer almost in the way he sings, it’s all attitude. Live Forever’ was my first impression of Oasis and it’s the template for what makes Oasis sound like Oasis. I love the tone and Noel’s guitar and I like the chord progression, but to me what makes Oasis Oasis is Liam’s singing. The songs that Noel sang are lovely, but he doesn’t have that same bravado that Liam has. It was a combination of the two of them, but it definitely needed Liam’s vocals out front and centre for the kind of attitude and swagger that he would bring to the song. Again, when I heard it I was ‘damn, I wish I’d written that song.’ It’s got a killer guitar riff and the chord progression is good. It’s dead simple and like most Oasis songs they’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, in fact usually Noel would admit he was just trying to write a good Beatles rip-off song!"

"I always wanted to be a songwriter and not a producer. Even though I ended up producing a fair few bands over the years, it wasn’t something I ever particularly wanted to do. With Echo & The Bunnymen, they were such a special band because of the chemistry and I always wanted to be in a band like that. The Beatles were like that, as were The Beach Boys and The Kinks. I felt like that was never going to happen for me, I never thought I’d meet someone who would be a singer, and I never wanted to be a singer. When Ian Curtis sadly died and New Order were going to carry on, I remember hearing “Temptation” for the first time and thinking ‘Bernard can’t sing at all but it’s great, it doesn’t matter that he can’t sing’. I’d have these ideas in my head and I’ve always felt with music that if you’ve got a good idea but you don’t do it very well, then it’s still a good idea. If you don’t have a good idea, no matter how well you do it, it will never be a good idea. That sounds obvious, but it’s always been my mantra for everything I’ve done. I loved everything about that track, the backing vocals, the singing and it made me feel like I could maybe do that, that I could be not very good at singing as well. I was already doing music at the time, but it gave me the confidence to sing on my tunes and give up on finding a singer. “Temptation” inspired me to get behind the mic myself, and if you have a good idea, then something will come of it."

"Say what you will, nobody is trying to show off here, it's just solid songwriting. The great thing about almost every song on that record is that you can pick up an acoustic guitar and just play it and sing along. Joe [Elliott] singing the melody, he doesn't sing the highest and his voice doesn't rip up the most, it just sticks to the melody. It's great rock sensibility. The melodies aren't too bluesy, it's just a really solid record, and ten million other people must have thought so too because they bought it. But the interesting thing for me about that record is how honest it sounds, yet how unlike rock bands it was recorded. We took Def Leppard out with us and they told us the story of how their producer Mutt Lange would get them in the studio and the record was totally fabrication, by that I mean they would put down the drum track, then the computers would move the drum track so it really felt in time. Then he would ask Phil or someone to play one note - so instead of chords they'd be doing one note at a time. Then the chords would come from different tracks so you could control it, one note at a time. That record took two years. I've never heard of anybody doing that before or since. You can argue that it makes it sound different or better, but then there are great punk bands that go and bang things out in a day. There are no rules! Led Zeppelin I was recorded in 18 hours. The Beatles' first two records were done in 24 hours. But you can't argue with Mutt Lange's success."

"My Father introduced me to this, he was very passionate about culture, literature and music, especially jazz and classical music and he would take me to see it. I lived in L.A. and on the long drives home he’d put on whatever music he was interested in at the time and was always really passionate about it. “I was a classical and jazz nerd when I was a kid, that’s what was around me and what I was learning about. My older brother started learning the guitar when I was about ten and I started then too, I got really serious about it and he sort of stopped. “I’m of a generation where we really listened to records as records, I’d go extremely deep with symphonies and jazz records and this one was really major. It’s a piece of music that’s stuck with me since I was fourteen years old, it’s the harmonic sensibility in it, the drama and the way it paints this very intense, almost kind of landscape picture. There’s a mid-20th Century sense of harmony to it that’s stuck with me and I’ve continued revisiting it and referencing it in my mind as an example of really rich, really emotive writing, without any words whatsoever. “It was my first experience of a deeply technical piece of music that was deeply emotional and accessed your emotional brain in a really intense and overwhelming way. That’s always been the goal, not to make music that’s cerebral, but to use your technical ability to channel something that hits your emotional brain and takes your entire brain over in almost a trance-like experience. “This was the first piece of music that I heard that had that level of complexity, but it was still as affecting as a Beatles record."

"I was never that big a U2 fan actually! The others, especially Dominic [Scott] who left before we got a record deal, were massive fans. He was a great guitarist - I think Keane would be a really different animal had Dominic stayed with us, he’s a brilliant guitarist. He basically just played a bit like The Edge meets Jonny Greenwood. And the others would harp on about U2, I was a bit younger and I was still into the Beatles and Queen, but Achtung Baby, of all of their records, is my favourite. It’s quite exposed, I suppose. I think that The Edge was getting divorced when they wrote that record and a lot of the songs were trying to make sense of that mess. But my favourite U2 song is 'Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses' and it’s really weird because that has the best middle eight that has ever been written - it might even be like 32 bars long! It’s a total heart-stopping moment, it’s vintage U2, it drops down with Bono doing his posturing, rock star thing, and then it builds and builds and launches into that great chorus. It’s classic U2, all quite pretentious. One of my problems with U2 is that it can sometimes smack of bad school poetry from time to time! I remember someone saying to me, “Oh that line about playing Jesus to the lepers in your head was the greatest line every written in a pop song!”. That’s the fucking lamest line I’ve ever heard! We met Steve Lillywhite when we signed our record deal, he produced that song, and we were saying, "Tell us about 'Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses'", and he was like, “Oh, I’ve got nothing but bad memories about that song! We couldn’t ever get it to work!”"

"For me this album was a pivotal moment in my life when I was 17 years-old. I bought it the opening day it came out – at midnight at Tower Records. I went home, played it and it blew my mind with its baroque production and how ambitious it was lyrically. I felt 'Oh my god, someone who is alive right now is making album the way people like David Bowie, Bob Dylan and The Beatles did.' It really felt like a fully realised act of genius. The lyrics were so mysterious to me and beautifully written. I still think about the songs all the time, and their cool landscape lyrics about decay and death. It's Leonard Cohen-ish. I was astounded by the whole vision and wondered how anyone who is alive right now make something so good. Growing up with other hero bands of mine like Nirvana, I always thought these refined masterpiece records were a thing of the past and that my generation were slackers who wouldn't aspire to make stuff on that level, but when Beck made Mutations he was a master artist showing you an actual jewel he'd made. It was so inspiring. More importantly, for me the day I heard Mutations is the day I decided to get a notebook and carried it around in my pocket everywhere I went, just to write down everything I was thinking. It turned me into a walking scribe of my interior landscape. I just try to excavate all my ideas onto notebook pages and I've been chronic notebooker ever since. I've never not had an endless scroll of notebooks. The reason I bought my first notebook was because of this record's quality, it set me on a creative path."

"I would say that David Bowie had the biggest single influence on all music that came out of the time period when I started at the beginning of the 1980s. And all other bands in that modern music zone were influenced most by David Bowie. Throughout the seventies we could safely say that he pretty much owned it. If The Beatles owned the sixties, Bowie owned the seventies. I could have picked any one of his albums. I thought about Hunky Dory which I have played most, or Ziggy Stardust... which was the first album I ever bought. I thought about Station To Station which changed things as his influences morphed and then the whole Berlin trilogy which were extraordinary records. I decided on Aladdin Sane as I think it is the ultimate glam album. Musically, it was fuelled with seventies energy. Mick Ronson’s guitar work is spectacular, the tracks all have an anxiety to them – songs like ‘Cracked Actor’ and ‘Panic In Detroit’ really had an edginess. The singles ‘The Jean Genie’ and ‘Drive-In Saturday’ were probably not even the best tracks on the album – ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ is my favourite track on the album – but had an attitude. You could taste the air they were recorded in. It was the album that turned Bowie into an absolute superstar worldwide. I played it a lot when I was a kid and it was one of those records that made me want to be in a band. Also, it’s by far the greatest cover of the 1970s. The image of the flash across Bowie’s face really resonates. It’s held up – I see that the V&A museum are having a big show of Bowie’s career and memorabilia (and so they should) and the image they are using to advertise it is the front cover of Aladdin Sane."

"The avant-garde comes to the mainstream. At the time, Terry Riley was an avant-garde composer. He still is, but he's probably more so known for his work in the late '60s. Indian music at the time was coming into focus because of The Beatles and psychedelic music. So his compositions - especially this one - were really hypnotic, very mantra-esque. I think Terry Riley influenced more in a pop sense than in a rock sense, and I think A Rainbow In Curved Air has probably equal influence to Sgt. Pepper's. And you can quote me on that! It's obviously where The Who got the name 'Baba O'Riley', where the band used synthesisers - that's from Terry Riley. We cut our teeth in Buffalo, NY, in the early '80s and in that time the place was at the height of avant-garde. They opened a music school where they featured all the greats - Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Tony Conrad - just a ton of avant-garde composers, who later became more famous. It was such a central point for the electronic avant-garde movement, one that hadn't been around since San Francisco in the late '60s. It influences everything that Grasshopper and I do. We have strange polarities of the melancholy, romantic side of us. Then we also have the avant-garde side of us. The rock & roll side of us is probably the least prominent in our music. One of our albums, Snowflake Midnight, is also our homage to that bygone era of electronic music. Once you put it on, you think, ""Oh that's where all that William Orbit and Moby stuff comes from."" If you look all the way back, that's Terry Riley. It was the beginning of synthesisers, arpeggio synths also, which eventually became modern dance music. It was his motif of making it more hypnotic."

"Field Music are the kind of band that don't inspire me, in as much as they don't inspire me to pick up a guitar again - they make me realise there's no point. No matter how much time I put in, I'll never be able to get anywhere near their inventiveness and dexterity. David and Peter Brewis are not only two of the best guitarists in Britain - they're also two of the best drummers, songwriters and producers as well. I got into them around their Tones Of Town album which is like their Beatles album, with perhaps a bit of Genesis thrown in for good measure. 'She Can Do What She Wants' is perfect pop music and 'A Gap Has Appeared' is two minutes of unbridled prog-pop genius. After this, they weren't even sure if there would be another album, but thankfully there was Measure, their most accomplished work to date. It's a masterpiece. It sounds like it was recorded on a huge budget with Todd Rundgren producing. It wasn't, however - it was just Pete and David in their own studio in Sunderland. From start to finish, this is a flawless modern band showing their talents and influences. They're on hiatus now, and I don't know exactly what that means. I know Peter and his missus Jen are expecting a baby in March, and when I teamed Matt Friedberger and David up for a recent session for my programme there was talk of them forming a band together. That'll be mind-blowing. I told David I'd want to be their roadie if they get the band together and tour. He said, 'Well, we will be needing a bass player…' Ha… No chance. Not in a million years will I put myself between two musicians I reckon are absolutely worthy of the title genius. I'll be happy carrying their amps."