"The irony about Berlin is that it was delivered as a concept album, but its component parts are from all over the place. The earliest songs off it are demos for the Velvet Underground. It's intriguing because 'Berlin' the song is from his first solo album, and then you've got 'Stephanie Says' [from VU] which has been changed to 'Caroline Says I'. He rejigged everything and came up with a concept album, but it's a hodge podge really. I interviewed him about Berlin and just about got away with it because I love the album. And I don't think it would have been as good if Bob Ezrin hadn't been producer. As much as David Bowie and Mick Ronson turned Transformer into the album it is, Bob Ezrin turned Berlin into the album that it is. The story goes that Bob Ezrin told his own kids that their mum had died just so he could record them crying for the album, and then when he had that on tape he told them, nah, she's alright really, I just made it up. That's what I heard anyway. You want to know why Lou Reed punched David Bowie that time? Well, I heard it was because Bowie offered to produce Berlin, but on the condition that Reed quit heroin. But Berlin is just an amazing album, especially coming straight off the back of Transformer, and you can tell that Lou Reed is not comfortable with being a pop star as presented by David Bowie. Somebody like Lou Reed [who] actually did reinvent the wheel – with some help from John Cale – with the Velvet Underground, and then one of his acolytes is seen to be helping him on his way. He was probably smarting a little bit from that. Really, Berlin shouldn't have worked, it was constructed from waifs and strays, but it has that great production with all the brass on it. 'Sad Song' is so beautiful. It's probably the most beautiful song you'll hear in your life."

"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""."

"I would say that David Bowie had the biggest single influence on all music that came out of the time period when I started at the beginning of the 1980s. And all other bands in that modern music zone were influenced most by David Bowie. Throughout the seventies we could safely say that he pretty much owned it. If The Beatles owned the sixties, Bowie owned the seventies. I could have picked any one of his albums. I thought about Hunky Dory which I have played most, or Ziggy Stardust... which was the first album I ever bought. I thought about Station To Station which changed things as his influences morphed and then the whole Berlin trilogy which were extraordinary records. I decided on Aladdin Sane as I think it is the ultimate glam album. Musically, it was fuelled with seventies energy. Mick Ronson’s guitar work is spectacular, the tracks all have an anxiety to them – songs like ‘Cracked Actor’ and ‘Panic In Detroit’ really had an edginess. The singles ‘The Jean Genie’ and ‘Drive-In Saturday’ were probably not even the best tracks on the album – ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ is my favourite track on the album – but had an attitude. You could taste the air they were recorded in. It was the album that turned Bowie into an absolute superstar worldwide. I played it a lot when I was a kid and it was one of those records that made me want to be in a band. Also, it’s by far the greatest cover of the 1970s. The image of the flash across Bowie’s face really resonates. It’s held up – I see that the V&A museum are having a big show of Bowie’s career and memorabilia (and so they should) and the image they are using to advertise it is the front cover of Aladdin Sane."

"I read these out loud quite often. The letters are gathered from such a diverse range of people, from Steve Martin to Napoleon, and David Bowie to Mary, Queen of Scots—in this case on the night of her execution. There are love letters, letters of state, there’s a particularly funny one from a British ambassador to Moscow. They are tiny chinks of light into all these different lives, from Charlie Chaplin to Hitler. Each letter is reproduced as a facsimile of the original."

"The ‘60s was such a powerful decade for music, but in the ‘70s it suddenly felt really old to me. If you’d have asked me about The Beach Boys and The Beatles at that point, I’d have called it a load of old tosh. I was looking for my thing and the new thing, and Bowie led me into The Velvet Underground, which led me into glam rock and the New York punk scene. I remember first seeing ‘Starman’ on Top Of The Pops and I’d never seen anyone who looked like David Bowie did - it was all sparkly and mad hair, but the song sounded amazing. The message of there being something out there for you really hit home with a lot of people who were my age, and it came at a time when everyone was searching for something that our generation could call music. Bowie had his moments as an artist, didn’t he? It’s a controversial thing to say, but I think Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory were the only great albums he did really. He had fantastic tracks from other albums - I love “Heroes” and I love “Ashes To Ashes”, they’re brilliant songs - but in terms of albums, it’s Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory that mean a lot to me.”"

"I have a weird relationship with David Bowie. There's a part of me that didn't want to include him out of bloody-mindedness, not out of any disrespect to him but because I get sick of talking about David Bowie, what with all those comparisons we drew. People said that Suede were like a mixture of The Smiths and Bowie, when actually there are all these other comparisons that could have been made. But I can't get away from the fact that he is a huge influence on what I do, and you can't get away from the fact that he simply is one of the greatest artists of all time and he made some of the greatest music of the 1970s, and six or seven unbelievably good records. Low is just one of them, I could have chosen Hunky Dory, Space Oddity, Scary Monsters, Young Americans. But I've chosen Low because I love the mystery of it, even though it's not his best song album - there's no 'Quicksand' or anything like that. You can tell that he's shifting, and looking for something else. My favourite track on it is 'Warszawa', with its amazing Wagnerian stirring in the music. Suede's 'Europe Is Our Playground' had a sense that it was a version of that. I love the way Low doesn't explain itself, and that it's a really odd record. I love the chronology of it, the fact that three of my favourite records ever were all made around the same time: Low, Never Mind The Bollocks and Music For Airports."

"In my formative years, there was Roxy Music, David Bowie and Cockney Rebel. And I loved Roxy and Bowie, but Cockney Rebel had a big part in my heart, even though they didn’t become as massive as the other two. Seeing Steve Harley in a bowler hat on Top Of The Pops doing ‘Judy Teen’ really sticks in my mind. There are loads of really great songs on that album, like ‘Mr Soft’, and I love the whole vibe of it. He’s an underrated lyricist, like Bryan Ferry. This was one of those albums you’d walk around the playground with, under your arm, to show that you were a bit of a Jack The Lad. And he sang with this nasal whine, and I’m sure old Johnny Rotten borrowed a bit of that. And I’m sure there’s a bit in one of the songs where he goes “DESTROY!”, and I’m sure Johnny Rotten got a smidge of that. And he didn’t hide his London accent either, which definitely resonated."

"And Labyrinth. Labyrinth was sort of the same… Loved Labyrinth. I watched it again recently and had a total adult crush on David Bowie. I used to just think he was cool, and now I’m like, “Oh my God, he’s so hot in that movie.” So 80s and glam rock. And I think both of those movies are sort of, really so fancy, but there was something… I don’t know. To me, I didn’t feel like I was suspending reality. It just was like, “That’s the world this movie exists in, and I want to be in it,” you know what I mean? I just love both of those movies."