"We walk every morning down to the sea and along the coast, and every third or fourth morning we stop at the Real Patisserie. We were buying some bread in there and this music came on, so I shazamed it and it was the single, 'Clear', from this album. Matty is the best of a whole group of artists in North America who are drinking very heavily from the fountain of early 70s music, especially relating to George Harrison, Emitt Rhodes and biggest of all, Todd Rundgren. Now I've been a Todd Rundgren fan for a zillion years, and there was a point in the middle of the last decade when I realised that musical recycling is kind of okay as long as you're not doing it exactly the same. I could mention some other artists like Mild High Club and Drugdealer: they're not slavishly trying to make records that sound like they were made in the early 70s, but it's the same harmonic world, and I'm very much a harmonic world kind of person. That's how I hear music. The song 'Clear' touches on things that I just love, and the album didn't disappoint; there were four or five really good tracks on there. And then I was in the Small Batch coffee shop and this music came on and I thought what's that, that's great, and it was another track from the Matty album. I was like, wow, that guy's cool. He's the keyboard player in Badbadnotgood, who I don't know anything about apart from the name, and the fact that it's a really stupid name as well."

"They were in my opinion one of the best West Coast bands from the 70s. I got this album around 1970; I can't remember what year it came out, 68 or 69, something like that. It's got one or two unbelievable tracks on it: 'Ice' and the title track. Both are amazing instrumental pieces which are really like nothing I'd ever heard before. They're jazzy but they have a flavour, a rhythm of something else. Some of the songs are okay and some of the songs are a bit silly. I had a little square Dansette and a tiny room when I was a kid and the room was twice the size of the bed, and I used to lie on my bed with the speaker next to my ear. And I remember it being very hot and listening to that album and feeling like the music had captured the heat in a way that no other music that I'd heard actually did. So I always associate it with heat. And I always figure that if somebody knows about Spirit then they probably know quite a lot about music. And the guy who produced it is the guy who later went on to produce Carole King, and he was interviewed for the NME. At the time Carole King was regarded as being super unhip, and the journalist said oh, you produced the Spirit album; they were fantastic. And the guy said oh, I didn't really understand the music, which I thought was stupidly disingenuous, because actually he brought a really interesting touch to it."

"This is the most contemporary record of the lot. They're a West Coast band. There's one track on there called 'Valiant Brave', which is one the most extraordinary songs I've heard in many years. It sounds like an Apache war cry recorded on the backside of a mountain somewhere. It's the most indescribable record. I'd love to have written it. There's just two chords and the arrangement is quite unusual. It hit me first time round and I was listening to it over and over. Then I bought the album. The rest of the album is very tight harmony work. They sound like sons of the Beach Boys. It's encouraging to hear a young band sound that good. It's purist. It's where the Fleet Foxes are going. It's a lovely record. Primarily I find new music by people telling me about bands, but I like the Uncut and Mojo magazine sampler CDs – they've got a wealth of tracks by new bands, underground bands. That's where I heard 'Valient Brave'. When you're making a living out of music and writing, there's such a lot to learn from what's already been recorded. It'd take you a lifetime to appreciate what's been done. But it's great when something is out on its own and you hit on something new; when someone's hit on a pulse and it's not derivative. Very early Blur were really good and the first Supergrass EP was fabulous. That was the last time it got exciting for me. Damon [Albarn] gave me a cuddle at the Hootenanny recently and told me he loved me."