"Violent Femmes was a huge high-school record. I probably got it when I was 14 or 15. I just played the entire album on stage with [Femmes bassist] Brian Ritchie, Brian from the Dresden Dolls and [Bad Seed] Mick Harvey, so I found myself revisiting the record and my early experiences of it. The one thing I remembered was that when I heard that record for the first time, I thought Gordon Gano was a girl. But really sexy! The songs were so sexy and raw and filled with beautiful, actually relatable teenage angst. The music and the production was all so immediate. My cool friends and my older brother were all listening to punk. I tried to be cool and tried to like the Sex Pistols, but I just couldn't get into the records. There just wasn't enough song there for me. But the Violent Femmes was like punk music that my brain could actually follow. I played that tape into the ground, just a non-stop soundtrack. Another thing I realised revisiting it was there's just not a bad song on that record, not a single moment that isn't essential. There's not two seconds of filler."

"I was playing guitar when this came out and I tried to learn all the riffs. I loved that idea of transforming the blues into heavy rock – taking blues classics and giving them a twist. A lot of the music was traditional blues songs, but the Stones had done the same thing in taking them and twisting them. So many British bands took blues songs and made them famous –there are people who think ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ was written by the Beatles, and a lot of people didn’t know who BB King was until Zeppelin made him famous. When I was young my friend’s brother played guitar. He was really into blues, playing Chuck Berry, and he would play all these old recordings, so I knew all of them. All those licks I heard, I would then hear Clapton and all those guys play. I saw Zeppelin at Bath Festival [in 1970] from a long way off – the violin bow solo with the echo chamber went on for hours, but they were great. I’d never been to anything like a festival before, and that was the first real one, I was on awe."

"I first heard this one in 2000, or maybe 2001. My girlfriend at the time, Eleanor, had a Bo Diddley compilation that I think she got from her brother. I was grown by then so it wasn’t like I was listening to Bo in the crib, you know? But I came around to it. ""For a long time, I wasn’t a fan of the blues, because my limited understanding of it was cover bands on Sixth Street here in Austin - that version of the genre was just white guys trying to imitate Stevie Ray Vaughan. I think Bo transcended blues though. There’s so much more going on; there’s pop elements, there’s pure rock and roll elements. ""What I love about him the most is that he’s all about the maracas. That’s something that I’ve snagged, for sure, they’re the coolest percussion instrument. He went on The Ed Sullivan Show with a four-piece band, and one of them was just there to play maracas - that’s how essential it was to the sound. On this song, Jerome himself is the maraca player and he’s singing the response vocal - singing his own name. I love that."

"The Marble Index is a record that sounds like no other in the history of rock. It has a dark, European, stoic atmosphere with an intensity with Nico's singing and songwriting. You have to remember that with the Velvet Underground, she had to rely on Lou Reed writing songs for her. She wasn't exactly Lou Reed or John Cale either. She wrote a song with Jim Morrison, whom she described as her soul brother, and he said she should write songs and lyrics. Nico was a very cultured lady, she worked and hung out with the Stones, she was older and had been around. In fact, I think The Marble Index is a line from a Wordsworth poem. John Cale said that nobody was quoting Wordsworth in 1968. It's one of the first art rock albums and I think that there's an intensity of vision and focus on that record, unlike any other record I've heard. I mean these are the first songs that she wrote! Where did these come from? It's so otherworldly. This album was a huge influence when we were making Screamadelica, I listened to The Marble Index all the time."

"I don't like all of the record, but I forgive the bits of it that are drenched in too much Marty Ballin, because other than that there's 'White Rabbit', 'Somebody to Love'... There's that crazy reverbed out acoustic piece, 'Embryonic Journey', that I've been playing at parties at my house and no one knows what it is. It's otherwordly. And I like that era of radical San Francisco glamour, there's an element of that in Big Brother and the Holding Company too. There's something about the way the guitars and drums were compressed together that I like. I like that era of Grace Slick, she's at the peak of discovering her dynamics and her voice. Even lyrically, she comes out with some cool shit, she's so confident and so free that we get those great, simple songs. When she gets to that very last "feed your head", it's just a perfect moment. They build to that and it's completely perfect. You couldn't write it that way, you couldn't think to do it, you just have to do it and hope you don't fuck it up."

"The Deer Hunter. I think the subject matter was very interesting. The way Michael Cimino works, he just got so much out of his actors, especially De Niro, Walken, and John Cazale, even secondary characters like the French guy in the movie. I’ve probably seen the movie 30 times, and you’re just on the edge of your seat the whole time, you don’t know what’s going to happen next. I think the interesting relationship that Walken and De Niro had with Meryl Streep is very complex. Really great movies are made out of special moments, and there were just so many moments in the movie, like when Chris Walken broke down when they were asking him his family’s name while he’s sitting in the window. I always remember that. The way that Bobby De Niro went back to rescue his friend. I think the movie had a lot of layers and a lot of integrity, and I think the love these men had for one another was so real you could identify with it. It was like going back to get your brother, you know?"

"This album was massive for me. Still is. I first heard this on a cassette in the post from my brother with a note saying, "Demis Roussos on bass!" He put two tracks on there and they both blew my mind. I knew immediately I needed to find this record but was convinced it was incredibly obscure. A few weeks later, I was in this old drill hall in Falmouth that doubled up as a house-clearance furniture shop. Flicking through the records in there, between multiple copies of No Jacket Required and some Cornish male-voice choir stuff, there was 666. I bought it and raced home and was pretty pleased to hear it was a lot more bonkers than I could ever have imagined. This album is properly bonkers. The gatefold sleeve has a 2CV crashed into a wall; the music is so incredibly inspirational. As a piece of work it's outside of any frame of reference – it's like discovering a new colour or a new flavour. Every time I see a copy I have to buy it – I give it to anyone I know who doesn't have it yet."