"These guys are a Brazilian 60s band, who people in their home country think of as their Beatles, but they're actually their own, weird, indescribable entity. The band is two brothers and a lady named Rita Lee. More than anything with this record, if you listen to it, you instantly want to live in Brazil – and you know a record is good if it makes you want to emigrate. It really conjures up a world. It's so imaginative and fun, it's part of that group of 60s records like Sgt Pepper's. They were 17 when they were making this record but they were already master songwriters with a massive skill and technique beyond almost everyone who is around right now. Just like The Beatles, they are able to be haphazard with it – they are so good they can have comedy skits in the middle of their songs: the coolest chorus with sound of breaking plates at the end of it. Apparently they were inventing machines while they were making it. They were putting their guitars through sewing machines. So the pulsing tremolo tone through one of the songs is the contact of the needle with the machine. Effectively they made a guitar pedal out of a sewing machine! It's super playful and Brazilian in character, but also perfectly fused with the international psychedelic revolution but it comes off as this other animal. It's the coolest thing when cultures get mixed together, it's so great to see that hybrid to happen. This band was important for me because when I was doing The Moldy Peaches because I was so inspired by how fun they were. My fantasy of what a show could be was them!"

"I don't think I can explain how significant that record was to me. And the more I travel through my life as a musician, the more I find myself coming back to it again and again. My mom had a giant stack of vinyl – mostly classical, with a few rock records. When I was seven or eight years old and started listening to music by myself, that album became the daily soundtrack to my life. I would ask someone to put the record player on for me and I would sit there with big headphones one, listening, and having the record flipped over again and again and again. I would put the music on and just stare at the cover for 45 minutes. The artwork was so important. Sgt Pepper's was full of lyrics I could understand, stories I could follow, music that just made complete sense to me. I understood all of it, and it took me into a world. I think that was the first time I really fell in love with a record. I loved 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' and 'She's Leaving Home', but one of my favourites was the opening track. What I really wanted – what I still want – was to feel like I was at some amazing happening. As a seven-year-old fantasising about being a rockstar, which I was just starting to do, every time I listened to that opening track, I imagined that somewhere there's this group of people in this psychedelic wonderland listening to the Beatles. I didn't have any clue who the Beatles were or what they meant, I didn't have any fucking context. I just knew that if there was a party, this was the one I wanted to be at."

"I saw it when I was seven and it has stayed with me probably more than I’m aware of. I loved the Beatles and owned a bootleg single of “All My Loving,” so when the film came to my local cinema in Warsaw—called Moskwa (Moscow)—I queued up for half a day and got in. The film didn’t make much sense story-wise, but it was a mind-blowing experience. I remember it so vividly—the energy, the jokes, the crisp black-and-white shots, and above all the music. It’s a film that is carried by music, which was something new for me at the time. Was it the first music video? I think that British pop was responsible for some of the most inventive British films (OK, Richard Lester was American, but it’s still a very British film)."

"I’ve got to say that this band were a massive influence on late-period Oasis. It was the one album I bought from a review because it said it was a bit like The Beatles, a bit like The Stones, a bit like The Who, really 60s-influenced and all the rest. I put it on the car stereo when I was driving to an Oasis gig and right from the start it was like, 'Wow.' It just blew me away, the lyrics, the playing. And then when we got to see them live and the singer was this giant fat dude. We ended up going on tour with them for two years. I watched them every single night and I thought they were incredible and they became really, really good friends and I still think that this album is a modern masterpiece."

"I almost forgot about this one. It’s funny how easy it is to miss the things right in front of you, but this record, more than any other, is the most loved record of my life. I know it’s a compilation, not a proper album, etc, but all LPs are compilations of sorts and many of the songs on here didn't appear on LPs. Also, the LPs of that early era were stuffed full of covers that could have been played by anyone, so this is the most representative.
 
I’ve listened to it as a record all my life. The copy I picture right now is the copy that was in the flip-down compartment of my parents’ Grundig stereogram that they got as a wedding present. Like Angel Delight, the Ford Cortina, G-Plan furniture or Clark’s shoes, this LP was a ubiquitous object of their generation: a part of everyone’s life. That’s what it was to me as a kid – part of my life. It was my first taste of music, before I could speak, before I could describe what I was listening to. It’s still with me and I will always listen to it until I’m dead. It is part of life.
 
The context around this music has changed for me. When I was a toddler I had no idea how it came into existence. It was just there. Then I realised it was people who made it. Then I idolised them. Then I reckoned Lennon was probably a prick. Then I realised he was just a guy who wrote good songs, but became too rich and famous for his mental health.
 
I picked this rather than one of this band’s famous albums, even though each has such a strong identity, as it means so much to me. I know there are complexities of ideas, ground-breaking experimentation, revolutionary themes and era-defining moments elsewhere, but this is what defined me. It’s also their best period. It starts with 'Please Please Me'. It ends with 'Paperback Writer'. That’s The Beatles for me. Well, my Beatles. Well, The Beatles on the front cover. There’s that other band peering through their moustaches and beards from the back cover with the same name. Yeah, I love that band too, but not in the same way. The Red Album is the purest record ever made. I don’t know what it is – rock & roll, rock, pop, faux classical… I don’t care. I know the context, I know what it is and I know that nothing has ever or will ever be as great, just as I did when I was a toddler."