"This was the first band I ever saw. I went to see The Who at Charlton in 1974, when I was 12 or 13, and we bunked in, and supporting The Who was Alex Harvey. And, fuck me! He had this sort of fake brick wall, and he burst through and started singing ‘Framed’ and it was just a fucking revelation. It’s funny because I’ve been looking at a bit of him on Youtube recently, interviews that he did, and what a fucking character. The bits of film that are left of him, there’s a clip of him singing ‘Framed’ at some festival, and he pours a bottle of beer over his wild curly hair and turns it into a quiff with his hand. It was only when Jerry Leiber from Leiber & Stoller died recently that I realised they wrote that song. He shocked me, with the theatricality, the fearlessness, just doing what the fuck he wanted. They had this song called ‘The Faith Healer‘, which I heard made Johnny Rotten want to be in a band. Just outrageous, but charming and intelligent too. And they did a version of the Jacques Brel song, ‘Next‘, which was just fucking brilliant. He weren’t around for very long, but I have a lifelong love of his work. Just that mixture of comedy and… terror. Perfect!"

"Weirdly, I think Dylan's protest mode never quite 100% rings true to me. It rings 98.5% true, but somewhere, in the back of my mind, there's something inauthentic about it, in some way. And I think he may have felt that. I mean, what's Dylan's best song ever? Probably 'Like A Rolling Stone' and that's just sneering at somebody, a woman he'd been in a relationship with. As a body of work, Blood On The Tracks is faultless, there's not a bum note in there, not a bum word, everything transports you. You know, it's brilliant storytelling, and he's not trying to be too clever. With Blonde On Blonde, which is an album I love, he's trying to make himself come across like a brainiac, talking about Verlaine and French poets, which is fine, there's nothing wrong with that at all, but maybe you feel… I guess he always does that. I suppose Blonde On Blonde is slightly more obscure, slightly more difficult, whereas Blood On The Tracks, he's just storytelling, he just wants to talk about this break-up. I remember being with a girlfriend and her friend, and she said, ""here's the new Dylan thing"" - it draws you in, it immerses you in it and as soon as I started hearing it there was no room for anything else."

"I can't say this about every song on this list, but with this one I was quite aware of what the band were doing when it came out. I wouldn't say Public Enemy are my favourite band, but it's pretty close, and when this record was released, they were the most important group in the world as far as I was concerned. ""They were the most interesting, the most intelligent, and at the time, nobody was more controversial than Chuck D. They were so original; they were breaking new ground with every recording. Before It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, there just wan't music like this. ""That record came out six months before Fear of a Black Planet, and it still felt so sharply of its time because Chuck was talking about everything he'd gone through in the months leading up to it - the controversy with Professor Griff, and everything else. Later on, he said something like, ""Public Enemy is CNN for black people,"" and you get that with this song. It's totally brutal, totally brilliant, and totally of the moment. In the winter of 1990, they just meant everything. ""I've put this one on plenty of mixtapes. Plus, is that a Frankie Goes to Hollywood reference in the title? It's got to be, right?"

"I’m thinking a lot about both of my parents during this. They were both very ill with Coronavirus, and my dad recently passed away. My parents weren’t really into music, except that everyone bought LPs then because, well, you just did. There was nothing unusual about their taste; The Beatles, Sky and Elkie Brooks for my Dad; Cliff for my mum. A few years back, they wanted to be rid of their records; they had no use for them. “Don't you want them replaced? Get them on CD?” “No, we don't need them.” So now I’m the custodian of all these records. There is nothing wrong with Cliff Richard. Well, he’s a Tory, but apart from that, I will fight you. I’m Nearly Famous kicks off what I like to call ‘The Magnificent Seven’ series of albums that ends with Now You See Me, Now You Don’t. Together these behemoths of art redefine the parameters of music and leave a wake of destruction in their path. He can sing in tune AND in time. He is brilliant. There is something so welcoming about the sound of these records. It’s a period of high-end ‘fabuloso’ production, where everything is exquisite and perfectly placed. These albums sound like Patrick Bateman’s apartment in American Psycho. This album includes ‘Miss You Nights’. There are better songs, but humans haven't heard them."

"It’s the first album in two years that I’m totally enthralled and inspired by. I don’t know if it’s because of his [Josh Homme’s] near-death experience - Josh did nearly die on the operating table, during a simple operation that went wrong - but the lyrics are really a massive leap. James [Dean Bradfield, Manics guitarist] and Sean [Moore, drummer] have always loved Queens but I’ve never been a massive fan, then this album really got to me. There’s a track called ‘If I Had A Tail’ that’s almost got an In Utero feel to it. The drums are massive, the lyrics are brilliant: ‘I Appear Missing’ what a title! ‘I Sat By The Ocean’ is a bit like ‘Ocean Spray’, it’s got the same sort of bassline. The first time I heard it absolutely blew me away, the musicianship on it is fucking astounding as well. It makes you feel quite defeated. There’s a desert dryness to it as well - anyone who’s been in hospital will relate to it, it has a bare whiteness to it. It’s forensic. It’s actually a really earthy album, but not earthy like Crosby, Stills and Nash. Earthy like you’re lying there having an out-of-body experience. I’ve struggled over the last two years, I’ve loved loads of songs and records, but there’s been no albums that actually sound like an album - this one does."

"I was 16 or 17. I'd just started doing Art A Level at school, and this whole world suddenly just opened up. For ages, I'd been playing the flute, playing the saxophone and skateboarding. That was it really and then all of a sudden, I hit that age. My friend Adrian had a ridiculous record collection. He started making tapes for us, me and another friend of mine, and he introduced us to all that stuff: The Doors, The Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix. I was getting really into art and really into poetry. I discovered Picasso, Matisse, Magritte at the same time. I also discovered surrealism and surrealist poetry, literally in the same couple of years. It was like an explosion in my head. 
'Run Run Run' was just brilliant because it was so chaotic. I'd been into music for a while - I was really into The Police and various bits - but this was just so different. I just loved how nihilistic it was. Really dirty. Luckily my partner's a massive Velvet Underground fan as well, so we stick it on quite often, even now. I still get the same feeling from it when I listen to it now that I did that very first time. I still get that electric charge of energy from it."

"I was listening to this a lot when Supergrass were making Diamond Hoo Ha over in Berlin. This was the record of that album for me and I was listening to it over and over again. I love the rawness and the vocal performances. When I first heard it, it was unlike anything I'd ever heard before. It was different and I love Tom Verlaine's vocal quality; it's really androgynous and like the male Patti Smith. It had that delivery and I love it. I've never been drawn into the alternate tunings that they used and so I've never delved into that. I'm probably not enough of a nerd about other people's music to do that. But their playing is never pompous or self-indulgent. It wasn't guitar duelling but Television are very sensitive to their instruments. Everything had its place but I think I was drawn to it because of the band I was in. This was what we aspired to in terms of Mick [Quinn] being a brilliant bass player so we let him speak with what he was doing. And you couldn't tread over Danny because he had these amazing bass fills and we had that internal dialogue where everybody got to speak. The best bands are the ones that connect that way and are really on fire when there's that understanding between each other."