"I have to include a Woody Allen film in the list. I’m not sure which one, though. I love him dearly. I mean, he’s such an inspiration to me. And again, this list could change — and particularly, his movie choice could change tomorrow or this afternoon. The one I always love rewatching for pure comedy, for just gags that really resonate with me — which he didn’t direct, but it’s based on a play that he wrote — is Play It Again, Sam, which just has a couple of comic set pieces that really amuse me. I can watch them endlessly. And it’s sort of one of those movies that I always make other people watch or I loan to people. If they take as much joy in them as much as me, then I know that we’re going to be friends for life. [Woody Allen] plays a film critic, funnily enough, and he is sort of given romantic advice by the ghost of Humphrey Bogart, and Bogie appears throughout in places to offer him love advice. But as he sort of points out, you know, “I’m not you.” It’s him trying to sort of romance girls and meet women after his marriage falls apart. But it’s very, very funny, and it just — a bit like After Hours, in a way — it sort of captures the desperation of single men, single men who don’t feel comfortable chasing girls. It has loads of very funny set pieces. It has a sequence where he’s setting up his apartment for a blind date, which is just, to me, one of the most inspired comic routines I’ve ever seen. It’s physical, but it’s verbal as well; it’s sort of him at his most charming, effortless. It’s really good."

"It was really difficult to choose a David Bowie album. I didn’t want to put more than one on. For me, it was a choice between this, Low, “Heroes” and …Ziggy Stardust… – all equally magnificent records. This record I like because it was before he became a superstar. There’s a lightness and lack of self-awareness on this record, which I think disappears slightly on the later records. Songs like 'Kooks' have this real sense of fresh openness, which maybe he lost on later records, which I really love. There’s also some pretty odd moments on there as well, like 'Andy Warhol'. I don’t mean so much the ‘sample and hold’ start on the ARP synth – which is really cool – but melodically it’s really odd. It’s more like an Eastern scale than a regular rock & roll scale. It will go from that to something that sounds more like a music hall moment. The songwriting is incredible. I think it’s probably him at his best. Also, when I was going through my choices, I went for records I enjoy from start to finish, even though there’s a couple of songs that I don’t think are spectacular songs on this album, as a whole it’s a really great record. I remember distinctly buying it from the Oxfam shop around the corner from school when I was a kid, and I think it was the first Bowie album I ever owned. My mum had the compilation Changes Bowie which I’ve always loved, so when I saw this I was ""ooh, I like David Bowie, I should try this"". I put it on and thought, ""God, there’s a lot more going on here than just catchy pop songs""."

"Well, what can I say? This is a hugely exciting record. Aphex Twin has got a huge reputation, obviously. When I was 16 it was one of the things which I had on MiniDisc, which we all had back in those days! I would just listen to it continuously. It was just around the time I was starting to make electronic music on my own, and I remember thinking, how can you make this? The technology I had and the software I had was absolutely shit, and I remember fiddling with it and thinking that I couldn't figure out how to make these drum beats so complex, and so delicately put together. Every five seconds or couple of bars something new happens. There's none of this copy and paste which all dance music at the time was doing, thinking in particular of that kind of Ibiza dirge that was shit and was on the radio 24/7. You just get 15 bars of the same thing, then one change, whereas Aphex Twin was the exact opposite of that. He would just keep your interest piqued the whole time, and that's one thing which I have always strived to do with the band, just to stop things being boring. Perhaps we push it too far, but I think all the 'inciness' and the whole thing about not letting it rest and be copied and pasted, I think is in my music as well. The other thing about that record is that it's not really a dance record at all, it's just music. I mean you can dance to it if you want, but there's lots of classical stuff on there really. There are lots of quiet moments, and lots of awkward stuff that is not really dance music."

"In 1979, they’d finished recording their album, and ironically we ended up going into the same studio, TW in Fulham, just after them. And Elvis Costello had produced their album, and he’d left behind a few bits of tapes, out-takes. And we were trying to get the machine to play these fucking ten-second little strips of tape! All you’d hear was a snare sound or a bit of guitar, but we were trying to check out their sound! John Bradbury [Specials drummer] used to get these amazing rimshot sounds, and I remember asking him how, and he said “It’s the way I fucking play it, it wasn’t the way it was fucking recorded!” So, of course we were checking each other out. We played together a couple of times at the Nashville and somewhere else, and we were obviously in competition, very friendly competition. It was truly thrilling and exciting to know there was another band doing what we were doing. When they came to play at the Hope & Anchor, the pub we used to hang out in, it blew our minds to see these people who looked a bit like us and sounded a bit like us. They went off like a packet of crackers. I remember Neville Staple was blowing holes in the ceiling with a starter pistol! Then they stormed into ‘Gangsters’. I remember I wasn’t sure whether to feel jealous or fucking vindicated, that we were onto something after all. But they’d gone that bit further. It was turbo-charged ska, and we were still doing a bit of R&B, but The Specials gave us this revelation that the uptempo stuff was really fucking exciting. But that’s a great album, great songs, and the production is really clear. Not naïve, but not overly sophisticated."