"Obviously, Pet Sounds is a massive record and a defining influence on me when I was about 12 or 13 when I first heard it; a huge impact. But weirdly, my younger brother told me that he never really got on with Pet Sounds because he found it to be really hard work in the beginning and it took him many years to fall in love with it. I was really familiar with that throughout my teens, but then later on I discovered The Beach Boys' 'Brother Years', as that period's known, and I just really loved a lot of that stuff. In hindsight, you knew that this was a band that were, I guess, nearing the end of the road and things were changing and they were veering off. Dennis Wilson had his shit and things ended very tragically for him and Brian, with that well publicised walking disaster and they were really tough times. But Holland doesn't sound like a record where they're all struggling or coming to an end or that it's a swansong; it doesn't really feel like that and it still has that really fresh Beach Boys approach. I get this warmth from it and it feels like a big hug. It's this big, lovely Californian cuddle. What I gravitate to here are the musical changes which are almost like scene changes. You've got stuff like 'The Trader' where the second half just goes to another place and that's always inspiring. Of course they're not the only band that does that but it's something that's very inspiring to me, especially on this record. And it's like that on Matador where I'm not constrained by the typical pop structure of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle eight-double chorus and The Beach Boys are always brilliant for that where they take you off in a completely different direction. And it never feels as if it's self-indulgent, weirdly, when it should be because all of these tracks are so good and so technically proficient. You almost wouldn't forgive them for those self-indulgent touches were it not for the fact that these are guys on top of their game and you can really hear it. It's a great album. I've got my record collection in the studio and my main record player is out in the studio's kitchen and that's where I've got my box of select records. It always changes from week to week and Holland's been there for about four months now. There's always a good time for it."

"""This one is like the mystery house on Escape to the Country, it’s a curveball. The point I wanted to make with ‘2-4-6-8 Motorway’ is that it’s not one of my favourite songs, the point is it’s always been there but I only really discovered it and fell in love with it in the last couple of weeks. That’s one of the most exciting and inspiring things about making music, discovering songs that have existed your whole life, even though you may have only been semi-aware of them. “I’ve always found it much easier to place my faith in songs that have existed my whole life than a new band or a new artist, you know what they are, you know they’re not going to let you down, they’re not going to do anything sexist or say anything racist or make a terrible second EP. “It’s also so exciting discovering things, I love all those reissue labels like Light in the Attic and finding these treasure troves of records and artists that have been there your whole life, like ‘How has this existed my entire time on earth and I’ve never stumbled upon it?’ ‘2-4-6-8 Motorway’ is a stone cold classic, it’s very British, it’s a big song."""

"I guess you could pick any one album of their mid- to late-period, especially Revolver or Rubber Soul. This was very much discovered as a teenager, their story, their music, the feeling of a slight sense of ownership. I don’t like that, in a way, because I hate it when people feel that they kind of own our songs as a band! But anyway, anyone’s who’s grown up with The Beatles feels that sense of, “They’re mine!”. But Sgt. Pepper's… is just mind-bending as to how ambitious it is and also what their energy must have been like and the scene they were occupying. I wish that existed now; unfortunately it just doesn’t. There was a kind of innocence to that time that doesn’t exist now, it was a time when great pop music... you... you still had to try. I think one of my big problems with music today, with a lot of the pop music that’s out there, don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of great music, but most of what the general population listen to or are exposed to is really kind of mindless or soulless and music can do so much more for you as a human being."

"This album was a statement – here we are, Deep Purple. I think it changed a lot of musicians and the way they looked at music, in the same way Zeppelin did. But this rang British bells. They had other great albums, but this was the first one I got into – it’s great from beginning to end. Before this line-up, with Ian Gillan, they weren’t so heavy, then they went funky with Glenn Hughes, because he was a big R&B singer, though David Coverdale’s singing was brilliant. Come Taste the Band was when it went truly funky, after Ritchie Blackmore left. We toured with Blackmore in Rainbow a few times – nice guy one minute, then the next he could be odd. Once, someone threw a lighter on stage and he walked off and went back to the hotel. Other times he would play all night. He was very moody. First time we played with them was Donnington but we didn’t have much to do with them. One time we toured with them we did two shows and went down really well and they kicked us off – we turned up at Wembley for the next show and the gates were closed and we were told to go home."

"""I think I fell in love with this record when I first heard 'Personal Jesus', which was a big single in the US. I love the sound of this record. There's no band playing live, rocking out in a room; you can tell that they're sitting in front of their keyboards or drum machine and making the record one finger at a time. Yet somehow it's got this amazing soul, with a clean technical sound and the vocals are so powerful. It's one of those records for me. I used to always put it on in the car, particularly when it was raining and I had to drive somewhere and the window wipers were going back and forth. Till this day, whenever I put that record on, that’s what I can immediately think of: driving in the rain and listening to that record over and over again. I dunno if the rest of Garbage would necessarily put Violator on but we were playing it backstage at one of the shows the other night and Shirley was singing along. I think she said, ""I always forget how much I love these guys, they're a guilty pleasure of mine"". The same could be said about Duke and Steve too but I’m probably the biggest fan."

"Kristin Hersh is no ordinary musician, and her mind is unlike any other. In her memoir, Paradoxical Undressing, she captures what it’s like to be young and starting out, but this is a grazed reality, the top layer of skin stripped clean away. The book is based on a diary she kept when she was 18, which is, as she says, “the age when no one takes care of you”. It was a year when everything happened. She moved her band, Throwing Muses, from Providence, Rhode Island, to Boston. She was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, then bipolar. She was offered her first recording contract, with 4AD. She discovered she was pregnant. And she became unlikely friends with faded Hollywood movie star, Betty Hutton. “Betty sings about starlight and champagne,” Hersh writes. “I sing about dead rabbits and blow jobs.” Though Hutton was unpredictable and fragile (“Time is like a hurricane to her – a big, fast mess, sweeping her away”) she was also full of generosity, compassion and advice. “You have to leave things out to tell a story,” she once told Hersh. And Hersh listened. This female Kurt Cobain – he was a fan of her work – has forged her own brave path, often against enormous odds. And she writes better sentences than most writers do."

"Tonto's Expanding Head Band were very early synth adopters. Tonto was an acronym for The Original New Timbral Orchestra which was a reference to what they worked on: the biggest polyphonic analogue synth in the world. Tonto was almost like a cockpit of synths arranged in a horseshoe shape. When they played it, they were inside the machine. Zero Time was hugely influential, most notably on Stevie Wonder who heard it, freaked out and asked them to produce his records. They ended up doing Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness' First Finale. They also did a load of Isley Brothers records, including 3 + 3. Zero Time borders on New Age in a way. I'd never really heard music like this before – totally instrumental, the whole record composed on synths. I saw them live when they played at the Big Chill festival in 2006. I hadn't known they were playing [a line-up consisting of the band's Malcolm Cecil and his son, DJ Moonpup, with a portable version of Tonto performed]. It was amazing, even if it was a bit odd because they interspersed songs with educational stuff, little bits of interviews with Stevie Wonder and other people they'd worked with. It worked though – what a show!"

"So this is pre-teen me; I became a bit of a rocker. This is when I got into Marvel really heavy, and still playing in jazz band and other stuff. I remember my favourite movie at the time was The Crow, and when I was younger the littlest thing would snag me, like if I heard some type of melody or harmony or something that would immediately get stuck in my head and I would have to know where it came from or what it was. Stone Temple Pilots, for me, it started with The Crow. I remember hearing Scott Weiland singing the melody of 'Big Empty' and I was like, 'What? Who wrote this? Who the hell wrote this song?' I was literally like, I had to find this album. I would listen to albums with repetition a lot of the time, and this is right in the middle of like the grunge era. All kinds of stuff going on, and clearly Stone Temple Pilots, when they came up, were making waves outside of that. Ultimately, because Purple had my favourite song from my favourite movie on it, it essentially became one of my favourite albums when I was a child. To this day I still listen to it."