"The Cure was my favourite band. The Cure covered my walls, they were on the T-shirts I wore, Robert Smith was who I was going to marry when I grew up. At 15, that's how I defined myself. I owned all the B-sides and rarities and all the bootlegs and went to see them live whenever I could. I still look back at the Cure catalogue as one of my ultimate musical educators, especially because I feel like Robert Smith, as a songwriter, went on so many tangents and wrote so much weird shit. He was clearly a masterful pop songwriter, but he was coming up with stuff that was strange and experimental, and then stuff that was really dark and brooding, and then really funny and poppy. The Cure have this reputation as the glum, sad band, but I never experienced them that way. I experienced the music of the Cure as this adventure in songwriting. Boys Don't Cry was the first record I got, which was a great record to start with. But after that, The Top – what a weird record! Such a departure from the punky, poppy stuff. So I was totally hooked, and totally fascinated by Robert Smith as a person, by what was going on in his head. Any literary reference he made, I ran out and bought the book. I was obsessed."

"This is a very personal selection. I was 13 years old and was falling into bad musical company - Red Hot Chili Peppers, Limp Bizkit and all the music that the hot boys at school were into - and coming home and threatening to get a Chili Pepper tattoo. I think my father had had enough and told me to listen to an album as he thought I might like it. He needed to pull something out of the bag and steer me onto a good path. My dad loved Pavement. It was the first time I had heard music that I felt was mine. I didn't know anything about the band – whether they were dead or alive. It didn't matter that it was music that my friends weren't listening too – it eclipsed all of that. I just remember being really struck by how the songs would trickle in all these different kinds of directions and would have all of these weird guitar solos. They weren't as formulaic as the guitar songs I was used to from all of the terrible music I was listening to at school. I became absolutely fascinated with Pavement and I didn't care that no one at school had heard of them. It was the beginning of having the courage to say, "This is the music I like and I don't care if anyone puts it down.""