"This is probably my absolute favourite record ever made. I remember driving to my friend's house and he put 'The Sad Skinhead' on I remember thinking, ""What the hell was that?"" When he said it was Faust, I had heard of them but had no idea what they sounded like. I remember going off and trying to 'find' the band on my own – I wanted to discover them for myself and not have people tell me which was the best record, or which were the best songs to listen to. I wanted to go off and discover Faust for myself. It was when I listened to Faust IV from beginning to end that I was absolutely blown away. It's playful, it's beautiful, it's exciting – it starts with a 10-minute Krautrock song and then goes into this weird, all-over-the-place song which has no rules. And I love that. The conviction of it is tongue-in-cheek in places, which I am almost jealous of - it even ends with a song called 'It's A Bit Of A Pain'! For me it has the best attitude of any album I have heard. Also, I must mention the extraordinary sound of everything – the placement of all the little weird guitar parts. It's almost like you can close your eyes and pinpoint where everything is coming in. There is so much I love about the record but its attitude is the most prevalent thing. I hope it has seeped into my music. It's what I try go for when I am in the studio – to try and record in as short amount of time, so that I can achieve a sense of spontaneity. I cannot achieve that during lengthy recording sessions – it would iron all of that stuff out. For me, recording really quickly means you can keep some of that playful attitude that I so love on this record."

"This song polarises opinions. I suppose when people think of Don Henley, or the Eagles, they just think of Dads. It is Dad music, I guess, but there’s something special about this song. It’s hard to describe and hard to pin down. It’s so evocative – it makes you feel nostalgic for something you haven’t even experienced. There’s this word in Japanese, ‘Setsunai’. There isn’t really an English equivalent, but ‘bittersweet’ is close. Setsunai describes a feeling between bittersweet, painful and wistful, and ever since I heard the word I have loved looking for this feeling in songs. When I heard that Japanese word it lit up a lot of things for me. My favourite records have that feeling – that bittersweet longing that you’ve not necessarily experienced first-hand. This song has Setsunai. It feels like Don Henley didn’t necessarily mean to transmit that feeling and it’s a weird accident that he did. It’s got a quality to it that sums up everything I love about music. Some people will hear it and won’t get it, but I think it’s one of the best songs of all time. Some people might say it’s just an overplayed song, but it’s more than that. There’s the dream, the ideal on top, then underneath is the sadness or the end. It reminds me of America. It a strange thing, but I often feel more at home in America than anywhere in England. Places in America feel way more like a hometown to me than England does. And these lyrics are about the American summer, the loop that goes on consistently underneath – the insistence of that loop to me is linked to driving through America. It morphed from a song I would hear everywhere when I was a kid, on car radios or café radios or whatever, to a song I heard objectively and realised how great it was"

"This is from Lou Reed’s sixth solo record Coney Island Baby, which was released in 1975. Whenever this song comes on it has this incredible ability to transport me back to a specific car journey; I was nine years old and I was being driven to Heathrow in the back of my Dad's car. “My parents had recently separated, and I was living with my Mum in France. I had to fly back to the UK for hospital operations, which is why Dad was driving me to the airport, to fly home to France. Nine years old is quite young to fly on your own, and I remember it being a traumatic experience to say goodbye to one parent and then fly across what felt like an entire ocean, especially after surgery. “On this occasion my Dad had Lou Reed playing and “Coney Island Baby” came on. I was too young to understand the lyrics, but I felt them. I received the sentiment of the song even in my tiny child mind. It cut through everything in that moment - I can still smell the leather of the car seats, I can still taste the tears rolling down my cheek and still see the tears on my Dad’s face in the rear-view mirror. I actually usually skip this song when it comes on, because it’s almost too much to be transported back into that sort of pain. “As a lyricist, I really scrutinize lyrics and I always try and follow the story when I listen to music. When I fall in love with an artist, I’m always Googling the lyrics and trying to work out the various meanings and duality behind the words. With a song like this, which I discovered when I was so young, the lyrics are almost unimportant. It’s more about the feeling that they convey. “There probably is a narrative there, but when I listen to the song its lost on me. I’m absorbed by the feeling of being in that car."

"This is weird. I only came across them because one of our neighbour's kids had a band and I used to go around and help them out by plugging things back in properly or they'd come round to mine and I would do them a demo. But they used to play me records and I used to ask 'what is that?' - one of these bands were Biffy Clyro. They didn't really register with me because they were a bit too intricate but I was driving home one night, coming up Kingston Hill and this record came on and I had to pull over to the side of the road as I was shedding tears. And the song was 'Many Of Horror'. And I thought 'this is the best thing I've heard in quite a while' but I didn't know it was Biffy Clyro! I just went 'ooh!'. I went home, bought it on iTunes and played the song about 25 to 30 times, crying my eyes out. Something in that song flipped me out completely. It's quite an anthemic, emotional song. I decided I needed to email the guy who produced the record and I just said 'I've just heard the song and it's completely and utterly blown me away'. He mailed back and said 'thanks very much for that, really appreciate it'. I've never done that before or since! But fuck me, music can still do that [to you]. When I listened to the rest of the album, I was like 'what the hell is going on?'. It takes some energy to get into it because it's fierce – there's some odd shit going on. I'm yet to see them live. They played Reading or whatever and I recorded it off the television and I've watched it on my own full tilt, having had a couple of beers or glass of wine. Just amazing!"

"It's simply a favourite piece of music. There are a lot of associations. I was listening to it around the time my daughter was born. She used to fall asleep to this occasionally. It reminds me of travelling around America back in the day when you had to carry around bags of cassettes and Walkmans. It's brilliant for train journeys and even now when I find myself on the motorway, Octet is the perfect listen for me. It reminds me of driving from Bath, where I lived at time, to London, to Richmond. It's just stuck with me for most of my life. Growing up we had Drumming in the house, my dad got that for next to nothing from the same charity shop. That's just repetitive patterns for a few hours, it's hard going really. If you came to Steve Reich from that idea, you'd think it was just academic music and not for enjoyment's sake and dismiss it. I was lucky to pick up a book from a book shop in St Helens, New Sounds: A Listener's Guide To New Music, by this New York radio presenter, John Schaefer – it was like the holy grail for me. I found that book in about '91 and it was a pretty rare thing at the time in that it had measured discussion on things like Stockhausen. We've got The Wire now, for good or bad, but to find that book at the time in St Helens was amazing really. By the time I got to America I had a shopping list of things I had to hear, like Paul Dresher, early John Adams pieces, things like that. I think the common thread with things like this is that you're constantly looking for the up and down stream of things – the connections, where something came from and what came out of it; how it got finessed or improved or whatever. I think with Octet, I'm not really that interested, it's just that piece of music. It's another world in itself."

"When I heard Girl Talk I was already in Bikini Kill, towards starting my solo Julie Ruin thing and I clicked with everything with a female performer on it. I was always aware of Lesley Gore and her songs and Joan Jett had covered some of them and I was like, "Oh, these are actually kind of feminist." The things that I learned from her from that album in particular was that there was a certain quality to her voice that told a different story than some of the lyrics. The lyrics could be about one thing but the way she sang; her singing had such an amazing tone that you really can't duplicate. I was just listening to the tones of her voice, thinking about the voice as an instrument and thinking – this is when I was doing my solo record — "It's not just the lyrics you're singing, it's how you're singing them." And so much can come across in the way you're singing that can either underline or scratch out the lyrics or amplify them. So I started to realise there were all these nuances there and her voice just viscerally affected me. I started playing with that idea a lot on the solo record. Some things didn't really have lyrics, I was just singing made-up nonsense stuff, it was just the way I was singing that was getting across, I was just going for a feeling. I was really focused on the lyrics in Bikini Kill and getting across these certain ideas and then listening to Lesley Gore I started realising it's not just the lyrics but the tone. That you can make the song sound like a sunny day and you're driving in your car having a great time and you can make the song sound like it's been raining for the past year; that was a new thing I found in my tool box."