"I grew up in a house with two older brothers, and my parents played music a lot. I remember that Prince just used to be on in the car. Parade is one that I remember from a young age more than the others. I remember bringing a tape of Purple Rain into school and playing 'When Doves Cry' and people dancing to that. I remember all of those records in a bit of a blur. I remember being in the playground at school, and singing to myself the song 'Under The Cherry Moon' from that album, and also 'New Position'. Lyrics would just come into my head because I heard them so much at home. Parade is just the one of all of them that I believe is the least dated to the time that it was made. It feels quite adventurous musically. I always thought it was Prince and the band, but actually, the first four songs he just sat down and made in one continuous go. He played the drum parts for the first four tracks in sequence, and then overdubbed the rest of the instruments. It's a really amazing sequence. The rhythms are changing and the tracks speed up and slow down, but it has this great live feel to it. It's really unusual instrumentation for what is essentially a funk record - it's got double bass, it's got strings and orchestrations There are some very short, odd songs, but they're these real bursts of energy. His lyrics are really playful on 'New Position', but then it goes to something more melodramatic on 'Under The Cherry Moon', then there's 'Girls & Boys' which is one of the biggest tunes on the record outside of 'Kiss'. It doesn't feel like a very mainstream or chart-orientated record. It feels like a very eccentric record that only Prince could have made."

"This had a profound effect on me when I was really young. I was maybe eleven or twelve years old when I saw The Who play ‘My Generation’ on a TV show called The Smothers Brothers Show. I was sitting with my brother, sister and parents and I just freaked out at how powerful they were. Watching Keith Moon, I just couldn’t understand what he was doing. I’d never seen anyone play like that before, he blew up his bass drum at the end of the performance, it was unbelievable and that’s when I told my parents I wanted to get a drum set. My mum said “Well, if you want to get a drum set you’ll have to take lessons and keep up your piano lessons too.” I promised I’d do both and kept up my piano lessons for about a year, but then I dropped them and focussed on the drums and started trying to figure out how to play Rock and Roll. The Who are in my top five bands of all time, in my home studio in Los Angeles I’ve got photos of them spread throughout the studios and the hallways. They had everything, they looked cool, Pete Townsend was an incredible writer, the way he played the guitar with windmills and swooping arm movements, Roger Daltrey was a great singer and an iconic frontman and John Entwistle’s bass runs held the band together. They had an incredibly unique sound. I still love this song, it’s in my top ten greatest rock songs ever written. It speaks to the essence of the confusion of adolescence and even the confusion of being an adult and what kind of world we live in. It never gets old, it’s a constant recurring theme that every generation of kids grows up with."

"I’m a huge Oasis fan. I saw Supersonic a couple of months ago and I loved it. I like seeing Liam and Noel interact when they talk to each other because they’re clearly brothers, they go at each other and they’re funny, some of what they say is really articulate, some of it is completely at loggerheads. I remember I was in Los Angeles, heading to the studio listening to the K-Rock radio station and they said “Here’s the new song by a British band called Oasis” and ‘Live Forever’ came on and I just loved it, I turned it up really loud in the car. It’s the guitar riff and the sentiment behind the lyrics, but the second I heard Liam singing he was just going for it. He’s got one of the greatest rock voices there is, there’s a kind of sneer almost in the way he sings, it’s all attitude. Live Forever’ was my first impression of Oasis and it’s the template for what makes Oasis sound like Oasis. I love the tone and Noel’s guitar and I like the chord progression, but to me what makes Oasis Oasis is Liam’s singing. The songs that Noel sang are lovely, but he doesn’t have that same bravado that Liam has. It was a combination of the two of them, but it definitely needed Liam’s vocals out front and centre for the kind of attitude and swagger that he would bring to the song. Again, when I heard it I was ‘damn, I wish I’d written that song.’ It’s got a killer guitar riff and the chord progression is good. It’s dead simple and like most Oasis songs they’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, in fact usually Noel would admit he was just trying to write a good Beatles rip-off song!"

"There’s a lot of albums and a lot of artists. There are bands or individuals in which the body of their work or an entire album would be big for me, but then, trying to think of just one track, I felt there should be something from Dylan, because I think he’s the greatest. That album John Wesley Harding, I might have listened to that more than any other Dylan and I still listen to it occasionally. I love it, and ‘All Along The Watchtower’ in particular. At that time, I hadn’t heard Jimi Hendrix do it or any other people do it, it was just this song. There’s something so dreamlike about it, something about it that feels mystical, even before I might have known the word mystical. It’s almost like the song is over without anything having happened. Or did it? I don’t know. I still don’t know. Did something happen? Did nothing happen? Of course, there’s the chord change and the sound of it. I love the whole album, how stripped down it all is, but with this song it’s the lyrics which really got me. It’s almost like remembering some words or images from a dream and it’s strongly felt, but then it can’t really be interpreted in the waking light. I was either at home or at a friend’s house when I first heard it and this probably adds to the magic of it. The album was really old and had been played so much when myself and one of the brothers closest to my age got it. To listen to it, there’s so many crackles and pops, it was almost like a fireplace is going. As I was listening to the music through all these crackling and pops and static, it was like listening to some really old thing that’s somehow getting transmitted to you."