"I remember when I was in high school someone signed my yearbook - this guy Guy Blakeslee who's now in the band The Entrance - amazing guitarist and he told me how to play the A minor chord. He signed my yearbook, "Hey hey, my my, rock and roll will never die", and I remember thinking, oh my god this guy's a genius, and then I found out it was the genius Neil Young. A genius steal. He probably thought I should have known it, but anyway I think I got the album after I found that out and it became one of those albums that feel like they're your own secret album. My mum listened to Harvest a lot so I knew the 'Heart Of Gold' era, which I also love. Rust Never Sleeps became my personal Neil Young treasure. It has such a raw sound, I guess because it was recorded live. I didn't even know there were overdubs on it. Actually a lot of the albums I chose were those live albums that are what is live, what isn't live?. But on one song on the musical we were stuck on the opening and I went back to Rust Never Sleeps and pretty much ripped off the song 'Thrasher' - the opening to that song. That was 'Fathers And Brothers' - it's just a stupid little simple [thing], we were just going for something really simple and I remember we worked on it all night, trying to get this arpeggiated thing working and we just went for the straight strum in the end, and the engineer/mixer guy came back and said, "Thank god you you went for the simple thing". 'Powderfinger', 'Pocahontas', they're all great. Young is somehow able to pull off these songs all about the plight of American man that would just seem so cheesy nowadays, but I think there was this experimentation with subject matter in 70s songwriting that was kind of innocent and is not really done today. I enjoy the storytelling of Neil Young, the simplicity of it all, and just that voice [that] can sing just about anything and make it sound good."

"The reason I chose “Temptation” was because it gave me the confidence to write a song called “Pure”. I’d made my first album and it was quite difficult, because I didn’t have a band and I’d recorded it all at home. I was lucky in that it had done quite well and “Pure” had been in the charts in America and stuff like that, but I felt like I didn’t quite know what to do. It didn’t feel right to just hire a load of musicians and have a band that wasn’t really a band. Then I heard “Eye Know” by De La Soul and it was the first time that I’d heard people sampling records and using beats, I loved it and listened to it a lot. I’d been producing The Fall at the time and I was very friendly with a guy called Simon Rogers, who was a really good musician and he had a sampler. With hip-hop, they tended to have the samples and sing over the samples to come up with something, but I wondered if you could use the samples in your songs, and if it would be possible to craft a song while using samples. I don’t know if anyone had actually done that yet - it was mainly people singing over samples, but not making the samples fit in their tunes - so on the next album Sense that’s what I tried to do. It worked out quite well on the tracks like “Sense” and “The Life of Riley” but it was quite hard on the others. Then I honed it down and got better at it and I did Jollification, which is pretty much all recorded like that, with bits of samples. Jollification isn’t really a band, but a record constructed in a similar way to how De La Soul might have constructed 3 Feet High and Rising but using songs and not singing along over the record. That album really shone a light on how to make a more vibey and serendipitous record than if I just sat there with a computer."

"I don’t know what concept it was. Whatever the concept was that came out of his addled mind, to me, he’s just got a cob-on with someone and she’s probably shagging around, and obviously he’s set it in Berlin, where he’d probably never have been, and just gets stuck into the misery of it. I remember in an interview with Nick Kent in the NME Lou slagged it off and then changed his mind and said it was absolutely brilliant. At the time everything I played was always in the dark – and I’d tell my mum not to come out of the living room door, and I’d be upstairs and I could sense the light coming from downstairs and it would spoil my vibe. Playing that was just, “woah.” ‘Caroline Says II’, is like, “jeez…” - turning the tables on old Caroline, in a nasty way. I just loved the production. The atmosphere was so dense and the concept is just that the songs ran into each other and this gave it a sense of order. What he was singing about made me think, “hang on, am I really being allowed into this?” It was a bit weird. It’s like a psychopath’s night in, and it got me. Whenever I play that, it’s got a very German, emotive feel. And any emotional German, it’s going to be heavy emotions, bad ones. They’re not renowned for their joie de vivre. Obviously Hitler had emotions, but fuckin’ hell… So it does capture that weird European coldness. It’s weird because you don’t know if Lou really cares, he’s not exactly Sinatra or Lanza, you don’t know if he’s taking the piss. He probably thinks halfway through a song, this isn’t any good, I better sing it weirdly. “She looked like Mary Queen of Scots seemed very regal to me, just shows how wrong you can be". Pure Lou Reed that was. I couldn’t do that because I don’t do sinister. That’s someone who has a different kind of relationship – it’s not just sad, it’s weird. Big favourite with Jimmy Savile at the time, I heard."