"Again, I love absolute everything that Ronnie did, from Elf to Sabbath, but it's his voice that drew me to this record because it's so magical and so unique. He was a very accomplished all-round musician though. When you look at his body of work it's just tremendous, but this is certainly one of his best. I love singers that mean what they're singing and have power behind them, and Ronnie meant it. This album is proof that you don't always need to just scream your tits off to make a point. The title track is the standout song on this album for me. If you look at any artist who has had the grace and fortune to be successful for a long period of time there are certain songs that stand out even on greatest hits compilations, but I own a Dio compilation and every song on it is as good as the last. I was involved in a tribute record after Ronnie's death to raise money for his charity. It was a great thing to do, and there were so many talented people involved in it. It just proved that everybody loved Ronnie. Not only did he create some amazing music, but he was a fantastic human being. People were lining up to do that record and by the time I agreed there weren't that many songs left to choose from."

"I can't pronounce it either! It's a fantastic record. It's got such a gorgeous mellow vibe to it. It's kind of accessible to people who aren't familiar with jazz, but it also has kind of this free, loose thing. It's not free jazz, it's definitely modal. It's got Pharoah Sanders on it. It's lush and gorgeous and kind of takes you to a different place. Sometimes Alice Coltrane plays the harp, which sounds dreamy. It's one of my go-to's in the morning at work (in Sub Pop) I just kind of put it on to get me going. I probably drive some of my co-workers crazy playing it. You know, there's not a really obvious influence in our music that comes from jazz. I know I'm influenced by it, but I'm not sure how. I don't like all jazz, but certain things I love to death. That's the problem with this list: I can't stick Charles Mingus on it, or Andrew Hill, or Ornette Coleman, or Albert Ayler. One of the things I feel lucky about, my high school friends and I who formed Mr. Epp, we would go to our little record store in our suburban town and the guys there turned us onto The New York Dolls and Ornette Coleman and Ayler and The Velvet Underground, Brian Eno. I feel really lucky to have stumbled into that, at that time."

"I thought we ought to have one classical album as I do play a lot of classical music at home. I thought about Chopin’s Nocturnes but they didn’t change anything. The Rite Of Spring really was, for me, the first punk album. It was the most uncompromising vision. In the period it was done, no one was doing anything like Stravinsky. He was writing parts for instruments that didn’t have those notes, so they had to have new ones made with extra notes so the orchestra could play that piece. That’s forward thinking. The whole story of the making of the album is so fantastic – that Stravinsky has no money and Coco Chanel comes along and invites him to live at his house and Stravinsky sits in a room alone writing all these parts for all these instruments. It’s extraordinary and a remarkable achievement. Then, the fact that on the opening night in a swishy Parisian theatre the audience hated it. They think it is the most terrible row and now it is acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century. It’s too good a story and I admire his commitment and his inventiveness and his absolute passion to making that record work. You listen to it and think "how did anyone ever do that?" Anyone who hasn’t heard The Rite Of Spring and likes music should really take a listen."

"I’m going to break my rules for this one, and just put in one old movie. I still think that Animal House is misunderstood, although I do increasingly read about a generation of comedians saying it is the great film. Because I think it’s a brilliant comedy, with brilliant acting, with everybody at their best – Karen Allen at her cutest, Tim Matheson at his handsomest, John Belushi at his most mono-syllabic. So these extraordinary comic performances with just a series of amazing scenarios with amazing set-ups with the horse and the chainsaw, the dead girlfriend, them going to the toga party, and just everything about it. It’s boiled down to the funniest joke scenarios that there could possibly be. That fantastic Elmer Bernstein score, which could be from Patton. “It seems to me like a really great, classic, funny character movie hiding in wolves clothing, pretending to be a big stupid old generic college movie, but it actually invented the genre, and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a funnier version of those movies. Certainly when I was doing The Boat That Rocked, it was M*A*S*H on the one hand – very casual, conversational, just guys doing a weird job – and Animal House on the other – with big characterisations and set-pieces.. So we’ve got four moderns and one slightly older. Can I have one more? Am I allowed? Just for sorrow?"

"I remember this from the time, but also my son, Sonny, who's five, is obsessed with this record. I first played it to him when he was three and he'd get his little guitar off the shelf and just go mental with it. When one of your kids likes it that means you have to listen to it about 15 times a day but I didn't mind. It's like, "Yeah let's stick it on, play it louder." It's just absolutely perfect and so heavy. And lyrically I get it now but I didn't at the time. You don't really get lyrics when you're a kid. You just think it's about horses. I always thought Jeff Beck's 'Hi Ho Silver Lining' was "silver lightning" - I thought it was about a horse. That whole thing to me is just a love song for a horse. Fuck knows what it's actually about. Drugs? Yeah, probably. One of my favourite memories of school is the school cloakroom full of tartan - that was for Bay City Rollers, but it just really reminds me of this era. My sister was a couple of years younger than me but she had Osmonds socks and an Osmonds lampshade. She had a couple of their albums. But 'Crazy Horses' is such a fantastic record. The first record that I ever liked was 'Billy Don't Be a Hero' by Paper Lace. I nearly chose that, but then I listened to it again and it's not very good."

"Somebody gave it to me in the late nineties, just on a blank cassette and then yep, I was completely dubious, because when people mention Miles Davis or jazz in general, I would just think of those crazy funk-jazz things they did in the seventies, and I didn't know he was capable of this incredible orchestral soundscape. It helps that he's reading from an already fantastic piece of music but what he did to it was astonishing again, so I love it. It's just the most evocative record. Recently I had the pleasure of a train journey from Bilbao to Madrid and I put that on my headphones and it was like, "oh yeah, everything is cool". Actually, it didn't [unveil new layers to the record], as I think it was really cool to experience it on the train going through Spain and yet I always think that music is so powerful that the images that you have in your head if you're listening to it in your bedroom are as powerful, if not more so, than if you were in some incredible vista. After that I went back and bought the early Blue Note records, which are generally brilliant. I'm not a real jazz aficionado and if I've put on an old jazz record, it's mostly about mood, because I can't really understand what's going on. Whereas with Sketches Of Spain, it seems more orchestral, where I can understand what's going on better."