"The Painted Ship are a psychedelic garage band from Vancouver. My favourite kind of garage is not so much straight ahead, riff driven garage, but warped and atmospheric garage – that’s what I love to listen to. “Like a complete loser, I’ve made a playlist on my iTunes called ‘Mood Garage.’ They’re the kind of songs that are perfect for when you’re in the car late at night. It was Rhys Webb from The Horrors who first played me this song a couple of years ago, I told him about my ‘Mood Garage’ playlist and this specific sound and he suggested ‘Frustration’ and it was totally right. “Garage is an amazing genre. The name comes from kids at home making music with only the means available, but then you’ve got all these weird records that came out of it and went in another direction. It’s like it becomes more than the sum of its parts, it has something unearthly about it that you can’t pin down. It’s sort of like a darker version of the ‘Setsunai’ bittersweet feeling. It still hits you in the same place, but it brings you down another path. “Artistically, garage music has impacted me because of how instinctive the genre is. When it comes to music that actually inspires me to want to make things, it’s always music that is a little more instinctive and spontaneous. I remember when I read Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds, this whole history of Post-punk that made me want to start like, four different bands. When you read about people who are making music with simple means, it feels spontaneous and it makes you want to play. “When The Horrors first started there wasn’t any discussion or question of anything, we didn’t even know how to be in a band. So it was all instinctive, a raw transmission of emotion and expression. And that’s why I love garage – it’s through this raw expression that a whole movement of kids in parents’ homes and garages made something that sounded, in the best cases, like it wasn’t even from this world."

"I grew up in the seventies – the era of the video nasty. My friend had Betamax, while we had VHS, but it seemed like Betamax had all the best horror movies. That was the time when I got exposed to quite a lot of electronic music. I was going to chuck in A Clockwork Orange's soundtrack too. It was 'Timesteps' on that that made the big impression. That and Holst's The Planets. I started to enjoy being frightened by music. My partner at the moment really doesn't understand that. She's a real soul and R&B fanatic. She doesn't get the fact that music's got to scare you. The Halloween soundtrack gives me a knot in my stomach… that's become a mark of quality for me in music over the years. Unless it's IBS [chuckles]. It's the tension. Quite a lot of my descriptions of music have little tags like ""nosebleed"". Music can induce a very physical response. I developed this theory that music was analogous to physical activity. Like sneezing; something as simple as that. It mirrors the rhythms of the body. A couple of years back I got Phantasm on DVD and the music on that had a similar effect. It's clear to me now, looking back after years and years of being a music fan, that John Carpenter's stuff in general opened up another field of things I enjoyed in music. The whole krautrock thing. There's a huge element of fear in that. And John Carpenter's work on Escape From New York… that dense, heavy atmosphere. He was consistently brilliant up until about 1988 when the novelty of synthesisers wore off. They became a kind of cheesy thing. But during that era, there wasn't that kitschy element to electronic music – it was genuinely seen as otherworldly and that still comes through to this day. The best of it transcends that kitsch vibe. Like Computer World by Kraftwerk. That sounds more modern and harder than most of the electronic music being made today. It seems weird to me really – to put this ironic slant on something that still works."

"Again, this is a real stoner record. But the thing with it was the method of tape loops and being experimental in the studio with tape. With not much other technology available you would do things with varispeed and loops. We only did it a couple of times but you end up with sixty feet of tape going round bits of microphone stands and chair legs and handles of the kettle and things like that, just to get it to play in a loop the way you want it to. And to then be able to build on top of that into something coherent and repetitive: in a way it really was the birth of techno. Certainly the more ambient stuff like The Orb, where they're saying yes, we like things that just keep going and are repetitive. But in a way again it's the dynamics of it, because what you really have is that the loop becomes the foundation and it becomes a mechanical thing where you don't actually need to listen to it once you've got the idea of it. It keeps going, your mind cancels it out and then you listen to what's going on above it and on top of that. So it is a kind of foundation thing, and it's almost like as a species, people like perfection. That's why we like laser beams and bubbles. And we like repetitive music and drum loops because our consciousness doesn't need to pay attention to them, but we admire them because they are perfect, and nothing else in the world is. That was the real value of Terry Riley for me. With the Damned's second album we had this song called 'You Know' and I remember Brian said it's just one riff and we keep repeating it. And I was thinking fucking hell, Brian, have you run out of ideas? But actually there is something that goes with that, which is that almost hypnotic groove that you can find yourself in when you're listening to it, or when you're playing it."

"This next one is controversial. It's Spiderland by Slint. It actually pipped out Isn't Anything by My Bloody Valentine. They did that because one of the reasons that I really love Isn't Anything is the sound of the guitars (and it's a wonderful record, don't get me wrong) but there's another record coming up that took that place. I think Spiderland was quite a transformative record when I first heard it. It was Dominic played it to me. When we started the band we made mixtapes for each other of music that we liked, which was good actually because apart from one or two, I'd never heard of any of the bands that Dominic liked. He put 'Washer' on that tape and it totally blew my mind… I actually even remember what part of the motorway I was on driving back from Dominic's house to my house when it kicked in back loud. I do have a good memory for motorways. It's got a unique atmosphere to it, it does make sense but it doesn't make sense. It's got a really eerie atmosphere, a really strange album. I love it lots. It didn't really annoy me [that Mogwai were compared to Slint] because a lot of it was through ignorance. We don't actually sound like Slint at all. A couple of songs had little sections that maybe did, ‘Christmas Steps' has a little bit in it that's Slint-ish, but I think a lot of the people that said that just didn't like us and just said that. A lot of those people probably adore Rid Of Me by PJ Harvey, which does sound like Slint! That's a great record too, but musically sounds a lot more similar to Slint than anything we did. But no, that doesn't bother me. Lance Bangs has made a film about Slint, and from what I saw of the bit they showed at ATP, I think it's going to be the best film about a rock band ever made. Unbelievable. I think people are going to be quite taken aback when they see the story of the band."

"We've been playing The Soft Bulletin live, and you have to consider that chain of events where you make a record but then you have to become the people who play it in front of people. When I saw The Who play live in 1977, that was really a moment that changed music for me; it was no longer music, it was like a deeply religious power to me. They were still doing these songs from Tommy, in a sense like they were on Live At Leeds, where it was just utter chaos, [and] utter release. And even though people would say that at the time that I saw them they weren't at the peak of their powers, they were powerful enough on this night. That was a life-changing, fucking devastating couple of hours of music. I walked out there like I'd changed heads. And it's like that on Live At Leeds. They start to discover that psychic energy: they're feeding off each other's energy, looking at each other, listening to each other, letting that be the reason the songs sounded the way they did. And that's hard to do, to be an intuitive musician - you have to surrender and say yeah, it's like this, and that's a motherfucker, what if it sucks? You have to trust that you have it in you. So when I hear Live At Leeds I'm always reminded that these are young guys, they didn't know that they were playing at their peak, they were just playing what they felt like playing. And the way that the volume goes up, and the way they even lose themselves - the playing is so intense that they even lose the tempo - but they leave that in the record and that's what's music's about. It's not just something that's kept in time, it's people making a racket. Fuck, sometimes it's out of control. There's moments like that on 'Magic Bus' or 'My Generation', moments in those jams that I think are some of the greatest moments of that type of rock & roll. There's that invisible energy guiding them through this. In 1970 you probably had not heard music like that ever.]"

"What don't I say about Aja? We all have our different experiences with Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, but everything that they've created throughout the years is really awesome. I have a few albums of theirs I love; Can't Buy A Thrill, Katy Lied, Pretzel Logic, but there's a number of reasons why I am totally in love with Aja. It stems from the personnel, the feel, and how much it was a stab in another direction of pop culture. It was anti-pop, it was a bit on the outskirts of everything, I think. It's always funny listening to Donald Fagen singing about stuff because it's like, 'what's the guy rambling on about?' sometimes. A couple of my favourite musicians are on it; like Steve Gadd and, again, Michael McDonald. When I realised this was Michael McDonald singing background I lost my fucking mind, like, straight up. I always loved the Doobie Brothers and I knew his hits because of hip hop and stuff, but I remember being like 'Who's this magical person singing these dissonant chords behind the changes with ease with this weird timbre of voice?' – and you look at the credits and of course it's Michael McDonald. Aja, if I can't listen to it in its entirety then I get mad; I get pissed because I want to go through the whole album every time. One of my favourite moments on the album is Steve Gadd playing out on actual song 'Aja'; the way that just like the drum feels and everything – I don't know how to play drums but I love to try to act like I play drums to that one moment when he takes a slight solo at the end. Steve Gadd was always one of my favourite drummers ever because of the choices of records and stuff that he would do. Aja is he was he was one of those moments that it spanned out to everybody at that point. It was like at the height of their popularity. That was what happened and it was perfect."

"There are certain bands that are hard to talk about, OMD, Simple Minds, where their earlier records were just phenomenal, and later on they made records that were too commercial and not quite as strong as their earlier ones. The first OMD album, Dazzle Ships and Architecture & Morality were flawless. They were beautiful, experimental, inspiring records, then a few years on they were making music for John Hughes movies, and they were good at it and I'm glad that they had success with it, but it wasn't nearly as creatively inspiring as the first three records. Architecture & Morality, I mean it's not hard to overdo the hyperbole, but it's a perfect album, so cohesive, and every song perfectly speaks to the other song, the unapologetic emotional quality of it is really inspiring. Even the artwork by Peter Saville, everything about it is perfectly crafted. One of my very odd musical moments was years ago when I was at South By South West in Austin and OMD were doing a reunion show at a BBQ at three in the afternoon, and they asked me to play bass with them. I found myself playing bass with OMD on 'Enola Gay' at a BBQ at three in the afternoon in Texas. It was one of those moments where you told me that actually I'd just done way too much mescaline and I was currently lying on a bed somewhere and making up the whole thing, I'd believe you. It's a shame that a lot of people came to know of OMD through the last couple of records that were more commercial. It's like Simple Minds, the first five albums are amazing, and then they became a stadium rock band. Now you mention Simple Minds and people think about 'Alive And Kicking' and 'Don't You Forget About Me' which aren't terrible songs, but the earlier stuff was experimental and textural and weird. Maybe someone sees OMD on this list and immediately thinks of a John Hughes movie, maybe they'll be inspired to back and listen to Architecture & Morality."

"Tobi Vail, the drummer from Bikini Kill told me about them, and I went to the record store and bought it and I smoked too much pot and listened to it and I was like, "WHAAAAAAAT?!" There was so much in it, and it was not because I was stoned, because then I listened to it not stoned and I still kept finding stuff in it. Sonically they really changed my world and the freedom and the looseness. They were funny, tough and experimental. In my small town there was a certain sound formula that people were doing and I was like, "Man!" I appreciated women being able to experiment outside of these genre boundaries. They sounded so determined and weird to me. They taught me about production. I listened to that album so many times to figure out how it was produced: which side the guitar was panned to, was there a double guitar? I would just sit here and pick it apart in a way that I had never wanted to pick something apart before. To me the sound of that album and the way it was produced was such a great reflection of their material. It just really got me thinking about and being excited about production. This was probably a couple of years into Bikini Kill. There was also a radio interview we heard with them, they were asked about sexism and stuff like that and every time they'd moan and make crazy dog noises because they clearly were always asked about gender and were so sick of it. I'm always trying to be super diplomatic but they were just such awesome brats. Some guy called up and was like, "I'm really interested in your show I can't wait to see it" and they were like, "I'm in the phone box around the corner", just making fun of him like he was some perv. They were fun punks and it's not just about the funniness of it but also about speaking back to power and you can do that through humour."