"One of the most important artists in British music, doing things completely on his own terms. Plus, probably the best artwork I’ve seen in years."

"My wife and I had moved back to Britain in 1992 and we were interested in every kind of electronic music. Before we left, we knew people that worked for R&S Records, and they brought around the first white label of Aphex Twin’s Digeridoo. We were just blown away by it. At the time, the space opened up for a lot of small labels like ours [Swim ~]. What was great about that world was that anybody could do it. You didn’t have to be British or American. That’s the great thing about the Boredom Is Deep and Mysterious compilation, which I was introduced to by a journalist. It was all Danish artists and it has the splendidly named Dub Tractor and Double Muffled Dolphin."

"It’s interesting to me that at a time when so many American bands and acts were getting into the pop thing, across the pond you had all of these great British musicians studying the blues. What Peter Green’s version of Fleetwood Mac did with the blues was not only authentic, it was positively enchanting. They figured out a way to have a good time, but they had their own unique sound and approach. In many ways, they cast a spell on you. They transported you to wherever they wanted to take you. That’s the mark of a great band, but as blues artists, that’s the mark of musicians who have really gotten inside each note. There have been a host of fabulous players who have called Fleetwood Mac their home, but this lineup is one to be reckoned with, and Mr Wonderful just might be their finest hour."

"""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 emigrated to Canada with my mother the year Mon oncle Antoine debuted, the same time that the U.S. was doing nuclear testing on Amchitka Island, off the coast of British Columbia. The FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) was flourishing. Canadian radio was given a mandate to stop playing American bubblegum round the clock. In this era of radical identity building, along came a candle-lit holiday fable set in an undertaker’s home in rural Quebec. The nephew of Antoine is a young boy coming of age in a world that no one outside his cloistered family could imagine. Mon oncle Antoine is about the sexual, material, and death’s-end taboos in a small village—and the taboo against anyone outside of it ever learning of such things. Some people puzzle over why this film keeps being called Canada’s finest decades after its release, when so many other artists have surpassed its modest ambitions. It is because of this: It was the beginning of saying, “We are not the back forty of the U.S.; we are not a trinket of the queen’s; our land and generations have given us a purchase of our own.” It was the beginning of remarkable Canadian filmmaking."

"From the 90s onwards French music started to become very interesting. There have been quite a few French artists, especially in the dance-pop arena, who have found their metier when a lot of earlier French music just didn't translate. We lived in Belgium for quite a long time and one of the things I was completely aware of was the fact that as a British person I knew nothing about French music. And that's one good thing that's happened in music over the last twenty years: the increased internationalisation of music. Yes, Sebastian Tellier has to sing in English, but it doesn't necessarily matter as you don't understand what he's singing about anyway. He kind of does it by stealth. People told me about Sebastian Tellier and I was like, "yeah, it sounds quite interesting." And then you hear it, and you hear it again, and eventually you're like "my god, this is brilliant!" It's a combination of music and voice, it's groovy and funky; it's just incredibly listenable and a little bit bonkers. Again this is one of those records that we've listened to a lot. You can just put it on and it's just there, and sometimes it's just so beautiful, what he does. I'm not afraid of things that are just beautiful."

"The more I read about the Tropicalia movement, the more it influenced me. I admired the way they worked against a military dictatorship. The official artists, playwrights and poets got together and put on full-on shows rather than just play gigs. They'd put on theatrical events with a theme or have a provocative backdrop that would get them arrested! It's a portal into so many worlds, like when Rogério Duprat had been studying with Stockhausen in Germany and bringing this back to Brazil, Can would also have influenced him in Germany and maybe someone like Cornelius Cardew who was like a British outpost. There's an amazing story about Cardew touring when he eventually turned against Stockhausen and wanted to bring his music to the people. He decided to tour the Isle of Anglesey in 1970 with the Scratch Orchestra and he got kids throwing stones at him during his gigs. Anyway, they ended up recording a few records in Brazil and this is one I play quite a lot, especially a song called 'Relance'. It's a few years after the Tropicalia explosion but Costa comes across really powerfully; it's like the artwork almost points to the Slits artwork but a few years beforehand. She comes across like a really powerful personality and there's a really unusual musicality on the record. This song ['Relance'] has a really heavy rhythm but it's driven by an accordion, which I usually find really off-putting but it seems to make sense here."

"Lyrically Dizzee Rascal is phenomenal, and musically he's one of the most progressive, forward thinking grime artists and musicians of our time. He won the Mercury Prize over ten years [before Skepta], which says it all. This record was what I listened to when I was commuting to and from Slough, when I was just starting Gallows, I was listening to it nonstop. I've loved grime since I was young, I've always loved hip hop but grime was so quintessentially British, you couldn't have made it anywhere else. To me grime is punk, more now than ever. Punk to me was the sound of disenfranchised youth, and that's what grime is. You take everything away from young people and tell them what they can't do, at some point they're going to say 'yes we can', and that's what's happening now. They feel discriminated against and now they're making the right fucking decisions by showing that. I think it's a classic record. What's really nice to see is that back when this arrived on the scene it was still very much about beef in the grime scene, people were still writing diss tracks, whereas what's happened recently is that when he played those tenth anniversary shows you just see everybody celebrating it, celebrating the fact that here's an album that did so much over a decade ago, and now we've just had a second [grime Mercury Prize winner]. I love that, but my problem is that there haven't been more. I love that these are being used as bookmarkers, as milestones, but we need a lot more than that, more progressive, forward thinking, unique individuals. That's what the Mercury Prize is supposed to be for, though it misses more than it hits."