"Led Zeppelin, goddamn! I don't think they made a bad record! There's that classic line from Cameron Crowe's movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High where they're cruising around, talking about how to get chicks. And the guy says: ""If you wanna score with a chick, turn out side two of volume four!"" I've used that a few times actually. It works [laughs]! Anyway if it didn't work, it was a nice soundtrack while it was going down. Jimmy Page is another guitar player that means a lot to me. Every member of that fucking band: John Paul Jones was an amazing writer, arranger and producer, as well as Jimmy. Plus John Bonham and Robert Plant... that's one of the greatest rock & roll bands of all times. It's just straight-up, fucking sexy, kick ass and shit, man! All the way from dirty low-down rock & roll to the biggest orchestral tracks like ‘Kashmir’. They travelled a lot of ground while keeping their roots intact, the blues. You know, certain bands really resonate in certain areas and that was one band that was always popular up there where I come from, the Northwest. You have at least ten fucking Zeppelin songs that you can jam with anybody at any time."

"He started so much. One of the many things I love about Bo Diddley, besides the fact that he created his own instruments with his own effects in them and was one of the first rock & rollers to have women in his band and wore glasses, is that he was a complete original. He's playing blues but it also feels like pop songs to me. Maybe I'm using that term a bit loose but a song like 'I'm a Man' or 'Before You Accuse Me', there's something to them. I feel like it's almost slighting them to call them pop but they're put together in a way that it's not Robert Johnson. There's something new that he's doing here. The fact that he had those shakers and it was such a big part of his sound. We've used that shaker sound and have tried to duplicate it many, many times. You use a little bit of room and you distort it a little bit and that's the Bo Diddley shaker sound. He took a form and made it something else."

"Magazine were also one of my favourite bands and that they came from the same city as me was a marvel. It didn't make any difference to what I thought of their music, but it was definitely a bonus. As a teenager I was very critical at the state of guitar playing and the usual cliché-ridden approach that was either blues rock or prog rock. It didn't mean anything to my generation. In John McGeoch, Magazine had a guitar player who was modern and relevant and interesting, while Howard Devoto was, and still is, one of my favourite ever lyricists. There is a thought that the first couple of records for many bands are the ones that are considered seminal. As is the case with Wire, I think that when bands break away from their first seminal albums - in Magazine's case that was Real Life and Secondhand Daylight - and they take somewhat of a left turn, it is really interesting. On The Correct Use Of Soap, Magazine did something original and almost ahead of themselves. There is a lot of space on The Correct Use Of Soap and I think it is better than the first two records. The space means that John McGeoch can really stretch out. Songs like 'Philadelphia' and 'Because You're Frightened' are based on guitar-playing that is utterly unique. It is one of those records that you can say that if it came out now, it would still not only be fresh but ahead of the race."

"I don’t mean this in a derogatory way, but Graham Oliver and Steve Dawson of Saxon were into the bluesy bands - simple but with a lot of groove. But me and Paul Quinn were into more muso bands like Genesis and King Crimson. That was the type of stuff we played, with more jamming and improvisation. As a bass player and singer, my goal was to play like Chris Squire. I used to try and learn the songs – it took me about six months to learn ‘Roundabout’. I‘ve talked to Rick Wakeman about Yes, and he said Jon Anderson would structure melodies like I do it. They would sit in a room and arrange things around the vocals, and we do that because it gives me more freedom to write. I could listen to this all day. NWOBHM bands liked Yes because the musicianship was great - it moves away from blues feel to a jazz feel. A lot of these guys were university trained, but we learned from listening to music. We knew nothing about music theory or scales, but prog rock really made you better as musicians when you learned to play it. It seemed unattainable because it was so good."

"I think there is an argument to be made for Wire being one of the greatest ever bands to come out of the UK. They have become a band to namedrop over the last 20 years and rightly so. In 1977 or 1978, me and my mates were wagging school and listening to whatever new records were out at the time, and that would be invariably punk records. A couple of my friends were into The Stranglers, which never really did it for me. I was listening to The Only Ones and Generation X and things like that. When [punk compilation] The Roxy London WC2 came out you had to have it and spend your hard-earned pocket money on it, but it was a disappointing, shouty affair. It was badly recorded with a number of bands who didn't do much for me. However, it had 'Lowdown' by Wire on it and the song stood out by a million miles. There was brains and originality behind the song. When 154 came out it was so startling as it was so ahead of its time. Well, it was of the time but broke away from the norm, which was very much still rooted in an aggressive rock & roll heartland. Wire really stretched sounds and included keyboards on their records, which at the time was a very brave move. I am trying my hardest not to use the word 'arty' but in this case, they owned that word. I had left school at that time and moved away from my parents and was living on my own. That period was key for me as a person and Wire's approach to guitar was just something I couldn't ignore. It was a real pointer away from the blues-based guitar playing which dominated pop music - including punk - since rock music had started. As a young guitar player, discovering 154 showed me a world that was an alternative way of looking at the instrument. It has stuck with me all the way through my career."

"It's a film that my parents introduced me to when I was younger that's by a director called Pasolini. It's a black and white film about the life and times of Jesus Christ. The only words on screen are words from the Bible. So it's a quite direct representation of that particular gospel story, according to Matthew, but it's a really inventive film. The director may have taken the story direct from the Bible, but what he does with the music and editing, as well as the use of non-actors in the film, it's just a really original and moving film. It features scenes where at points you're hearing a gospel song by Odetta, and she's singing a song called, 'Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child' which is this amazing gospel tune. She's singing that to accompany scenes of the children being killed by Herod. The music in the film is very raw. It'll use a song that's going to spell something out literally. I don't know how Pasolini chose all these songs for the film or who was in charge of the music selection. You've got Blind Willie Johnson - the old blues artist - accompanying some of the miracle scenes where people are getting their sight back. It's an exercise in juxtaposing very disparate elements that actually really enhance each other. You have to second guess it though, because of the way it's edited, a scene will suddenly just be chopped really harshly, and the film will move on to something else. All of these things are very powerful - and unusual - devices in film-making. In a way, if it's not too pretentious to say it, some of that harsh editing and juxtaposing with disparate elements on screen with music is something that I feel inspired by in terms of making a record. Things don't always have to fit together neatly, or as you'd expect them to. If you think about it in terms of the Alex Chilton record I mentioned earlier, that album is kind of a guide through rock & roll, country and soul music or Americana if you like, and this one is a guide to raw, blues and gospel as well as a classical take on the gospel. It's a very eclectic soundtrack with music that definitely enhances what's going on on the screen. It's very powerful music in its own right."

"Raw Power for me is the greatest rock & roll record of all time. I wish Bruce Dickinson [executive producer of controversial 1997 remix attempt] had never got his paws on it. I loved the original mixes, because that’s how it should sound – the guitars are miles too loud for a normal record you’d think, but just the way the guitars come in it’s perfect. I was watching this thing on telly about Vikings disembowelling people and it’s almost like that. The guitars have angles. People go on about Exile On Main Street, which is a blues record with no tunes, but Raw Power is unbelievable. I bought it just for the cover and the titles on it. ‘Search and Destroy’, ‘Gimme Danger’ - it was right up my strasse. I was 13 or 14. I loved Iggy when I was younger, still do. I can do without all the more Motörhead stuff – he’s lost some of the finesse now. But what a song ‘Gimme Danger’ is – none of the songs hang about. Every second is important. His voice influenced the way I sang a lot. Whenever we played America Iggy would turn up, and we got on fairly good speaking terms. We were playing in New York. It was like a football changing room backstage. I was having a slash – probably in the shower, and I heard someone. I walked out – obviously not with my knob out – and it was Iggy with a tight leather jacket and blue suede shoes. He looked fantastic, and I said, ""what are you doing here?” And he said, “I always come and see your shows.”"

"Basically, after that Ali Hussan Kuban revelation, I started searching high and low for as much of this music as I could possibly find. And then I started looking further. I started googling musicians in the Nile. For me, I found that it was only music from Nubia that had a certain thing about it. Arabic music, from further north, I love it and it's beautiful. I listen to a lot of that but it's more refined than Nubian music. That's not to say that Nubian music isn't sophisticated, but there's something a bit more direct about the Nubian stuff. A bit more punk-rock. I was looking for this music, and I found Mahmoud Fadl. There were these albums called Drummers of the Nile. It's slightly instructional in that they name a rhythm and then they play the rhythm. It's quite a journey through that whole type of music. This track 'Shofna Gamar', it's a pentatonic melody. Jimi Hendrix, the blues, R&B - a lot of stuff comes from pentatonic scales and it feels to me that these Nubian rhythms are the roots of our rhythmic appreciation. One of the big things in Melt Yourself Down was, if I take these ancient rhythms and just change the aesthetic of them so they sound modern, would it feel like modern music? It does. So I came to the conclusion that there's something in these rhythms that we really respond to and I think the same with pentatonic scales, I've always been really drawn to them. So 'Shofna Gamar' is an amazing way of making pentatonic scales feel really fresh, so joyful."

"A little like David Bowie and his influence, with me being a teenager during the 70s meant I never stopped being affected by Brian's music. If you were a big Brian fan, you would get into a cast of characters - be it T. Rex or Roxy Music or Bowie - and you followed the connections of those artists. Eno managed to stay really intriguing. When Eno's first album - Here Come The Warm Jets - came out, it was a record you only had if you were in the know. It was obscure and underground but I had never gotten into it. I had a couple of friends who were Roxy freaks and bought everything and anything to do with the band and I had a best mate who was obsessed with Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and was playing it all the time. I got to know it really well and it has connected to a lot of records that I like. Arguably, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) was the blueprint for Wire. It was the blueprint for David Bowie's later records and you can hear the proto-Talking Heads on that record. People forget that Eno was omnipresent in the late 70s on collaborations with Bowie, Talking Heads and Devo. If you listen to Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) that makes complete sense. It sounds like all of those bands four or five years before they made similar stuff. 'The True Wheel' sounds like something off Scary Monsters and it is four or five years before. 'Third Uncle' sounds like Talking Heads many years before - so make of that what you will. The idea of using the studio as an instrument, which has become commonplace now with people in their rooms on GarageBand, was a real innovation when Eno was doing it. There was no one else like him at the time. But, it is all about the listening experience and, like the Wire album, when I heard Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and listened to it a lot, it was everything rock music hadn't been up until then. I was making note of that - it was anti-blues, it was anti-rock and it was anti-faux authenticity. It was a long, long way away from Laurel Canyon."