"I think I must have heard it on tour in the late 90s. When you’re a kid you know Lust For Life or The Passenger and all about his work with Bowie. But when it came to less well-known stuff, it was different. It was before you could find things out so easily, you just had to know a bit about the artist and dig around a bit. When I heard this I thought, “What a great band, what a great time!”. It’s got that slightly postpunk feel, it’s so tight, the drums are really dry. And I love the backing vocals – when the rest of the band do them it’s like a gang but it isn’t laddy; it’s got a cool sophistication about it. I think that’s what Iggy brings to things: he’s raw, he’s kind of punk, but he always has a sense of style. Maybe that’s what Bowie and Iggy saw in each other, that common ground of not over-intellectualising things, of being throwaway but with care and thought. And I love his lyrics, they can be funny – especially with some of the ad-libs – but always cool."

"This reminds me of my dad. He was into liberation drum circles in the Matabele community in Zimbabwe and he worked with people from that community. This is a record from the Ndebele language. Nothembi is an amazing guitarist and it's a rocking album with amazing synths as well. I've been playing this quite a bit over the past year. I almost got to play with her but she didn't turn up. My dad used to listen to Thomas Mapfumo - who supported The Stone Roses at Spoke Island - and I thought this was really funny [at the time] - I should have asked my dad to come along to that gig! My influences for music were more down to my big brother and sister and my mam was into different music again. It's inevitable that you are influenced by people around you. I'd get Anglo-American punk rock and pop music from my brother and sister but my dad wasn't into that; [for him] reggae was acceptable and maybe Welsh language pop. He didn't engage with music to the point where he had influenced my sound whereas my brother and sister's records influenced me directly."

"Is this the ultimate in production? It’s probably one of them. I think you’ll find The Beatles might say that! They were always in competition at that point. You know, I’ve obviously spoken to The Beatles a lot but I like every track on Pet Sounds; I think they’re all equally as good. I couldn’t even pick one out if it because the arrangements were so unusual at the time. I remember it was ’66 and in some parts it sounds like an old dance band. I’d think, ""wow""! That’s so old fashioned yet so brand new at the same time. The arrangements were weird with these big harmonicas and funny, deep saxophones and plain little paper cups and playing the drums on them. What the hell was that? Brilliant! Brian [Wilson] was absolutely marvellous. Luckily for me, I did get to work with him and we wrote a song together called ‘Let It Shine’ on his album, Brian Wilson, in about ’89 or something. I got to know him quite well and he was a lovely guy and we wrote this tune and it was very nice and I’m really glad that I did."

"I’ll start with This is Spinal Tap. It sort of took an American perspective to show the characters and the attitudes surrounding British rock bands in the 1970s and 1980s, which, I guess, was what it was supposed to be, and I just thought the characters drawn were so excellent. And yet, it was odd, because everyone involved was American. You’d think it’d be just the kind of thing that some British writers or comedians could’ve done better, but clearly we didn’t. And I thought Christopher Guest, et al., did it fantastically well. It’s just always a kind of reassuringly funny film. The best comedy is watching humans interact, and people with their own petty ambitions, and self delusions, and all that sort of stuff. And that movie is absolutely brim full of it. If they say that comedy is essentially exaggerated truth, that was almost the perfect exemplar of it, where it’s almost a documentary. Well, it is obviously a mockumentary, but you don’t have to exaggerate much for it to become inherently comic. So that’s kind of what it is. It’s a perfect exaggeration, but exaggerated not very much."

"I went to music school and this piece is probably given to every music student as a main example of what medieval music is, so it's not obscure in that world. It's almost funny that I'm putting it in here but I do love Machaut. To me, he's probably more notable for having written these secular love songs, which was pretty cool for that period. But I chose this piece because it's so powerful in an obvious way, just sonically, and what's cool about this performance is that they have these inflections in the voices which they think, I guess, is authentic. But I think that's debatable. It might be true, I'm not really sure. The singers bend the notes: they sing in kind of straight tones and then they bend the notes in a way that you don't really hear in other performances of this piece. It just sounds incredible, authentic or not. There are revolutionary things about this piece and why it's important but I don't remember what they are. When I was writing my song 'Marienbad', I was into madrigals and that straight-tone singing with lots of different voices"