"The Cure was my favourite band. The Cure covered my walls, they were on the T-shirts I wore, Robert Smith was who I was going to marry when I grew up. At 15, that's how I defined myself. I owned all the B-sides and rarities and all the bootlegs and went to see them live whenever I could. I still look back at the Cure catalogue as one of my ultimate musical educators, especially because I feel like Robert Smith, as a songwriter, went on so many tangents and wrote so much weird shit. He was clearly a masterful pop songwriter, but he was coming up with stuff that was strange and experimental, and then stuff that was really dark and brooding, and then really funny and poppy. The Cure have this reputation as the glum, sad band, but I never experienced them that way. I experienced the music of the Cure as this adventure in songwriting. Boys Don't Cry was the first record I got, which was a great record to start with. But after that, The Top – what a weird record! Such a departure from the punky, poppy stuff. So I was totally hooked, and totally fascinated by Robert Smith as a person, by what was going on in his head. Any literary reference he made, I ran out and bought the book. I was obsessed."

"They were one of, if not the first, rock & roll male bands that I was really attracted to. I am definitely a female-orientated person, that's just the way I am. I don't go gaga over every single male rockstar that comes out, I sort of tend to be way more interested in the female narrative. But who can resist The Clash? [Laughs] even I could not resist The Clash. 

 I was thrilled by the sound and also the style; they felt like a real gang to me. It really captured my imagination and I wanted to be in The Clash. They still are, arguably, one of the coolest male rock bands of all time, if not the coolest rock band of all time. There's not anybody really that touches them. I love the political bias in their writing and I love the raucousness of it – and I thought they were fucking hot as fuck [laughs]. 

 Again, just amazing songs. Like, I associate 'Rock the Casbah' with a lot of great parties that I went to around about that time. There was a lot of finger-fucking going on to The Clash, an innocent but erotic memory. My sexuality was beginning to really explode when I discovered The Clash so I always associate it with that kind of hotness. It's just The Clash equals hotness. End of story."

"This one I discovered more recently. I'm a big Hermeto Pascoal fan; I was turned onto Hermeto by Kamasi Washington when we were teenagers. But, again, it's Brazilian and stuff like that you have to seek out, you have to want to find it yourself because it doesn't always get translated. I didn't know about Egberto Gismonti at first, but I spent a lot of time listening to Hermeto, and I remember I went on tour with Miguel Atwood Ferguson in the band with me at one point. And Miguel is also an astute follower of music, to say the least. We were listening to Hermeto Pascoal backstage and Miguel turns and he goes 'Is this Hermeto? Do you know about his friend Egberto Gismonti?' and I was like, 'no'. Miguel proceeds to tell me this is the person that plays bass with Hermeto Pasqual, and he's a beast of a composer. He played me the album, and I was floored. I was completely overtaken by this album and the composition. It tells such a story – Egberto Gismonti's albums in general tell a story – but this specific album, there's some moments on it that are so intense that it's hard to listen to them. It's hard to play one song for somebody, but if I've ever played the record for somebody, it has to be listened to very loud."