"This was the great danger of me picking these records - that they'd all come from 1974, but that was when I was most enthusiastic about buying records. And Marquee Moon… I just played it over and over and over again. I just love it. US punk was very different [to UK punk]; over here, the concept of it was absolutely fantastic, and that was the whole thing that got me into it, but it was a bit one dimensional. The Ramones were great, but they were kind of a caricature - a cartoon band. And a lot of punk over here seemed to go for that, as a backlash against over sophistication. I just felt that Marquee Moon and the stuff from New York was odd, and it was different, and it was weird - and I always liked weird thing. It still had a lot of energy; I liked Marquee Moon in preference to, say, Patti Smith's Horses… it was just contrived enough. Any further and it would be too pretentious. It's still great today; as soon as I put it on and hear those first few bars of 'See No Evil', it reminds me of when it first came out and I played it non-stop. Although imagine my disappointment when I bought Adventure on the red vinyl and tried desperately to like 'Foxhole', and it didn't happen."

"They're an incredible band, on Fiction and maybe even slightly discovered by The Cure. They were Americans but lived in London and were involved in the Camden scene with Silverfish, Ligament and all these kind of bands. It's almost metal, but it's also really bleak. A wonderful band, they made two records and then the bass player died so I never got to see them live. Martin our drummer saw them play. When we started Mogwai they were one of the bands we all bonded over. We were all big God Machine fans and actually used to do a couple of covers of their songs. The records have definitely held up and stood the test of time. I think I found them, you're about the same age as me so you'll remember this, but whenever a major label like Fiction tried to punt a new band they're pretty much give the records away, so you'd get singles and 7" for 49p. You could try out a lot of bands. When I moved my records a few years ago I had so many 7" of horrible bands that are just cataclysmically awful that I bought just because they were 50p. But that's how I discovered The God Machines and they're a big Mogwai band, there's no argument about that."

"Criterion has so much Ozu. Ten to fifteen years ago, I hunted through Japanese markets in L.A. and San Francisco for DVDs of otherwise unavailable Ozu. Because Ozu movies settle my mind. At one point in the late 1980s I was in Los Angeles for an extended period of time. I got in the habit of renting movies from Tower Video on Sunset. The two gold mines I remember best were the Humphrey Bogart Santana productions and the Wim Wenders movies, including Tokyo-ga. I watched Tokyo-ga through a filter of loving Wenders; otherwise, its content was pretty mystifying. A year or two later someone showed me Tokyo Story, and I wished Ozu was my mother. So generous and gentle. Patiently ignoring the 180-degree line (which bugs the fuck out of me in production). Of course, I don’t know Yasujiro Ozu; still, I love the man who gave these movies to us. And what lessons! The pairing of I Was Born, But . . . and Good Morning. He didn’t know he was doing it, because at the time he made Good Morning, I imagine that I Was Born, But . . . was ancient history. Now the two movies are equally present, and they stand alone and together. I choose the Floating Weeds movies, as among the genre of movies about us performing artists those movies reign."

"I just feel like that’s a movie that I saw when I was a kid, and you watch it over and over and over again, and you’re like, “Oh, Steve Martin’s doing bits, but they fit a story.” And it’s beautifully shot and directed by Carl Reiner, which some people don’t realize, and I just can’t think of a movie that informed my comedic personality more than The Jerk. It’s also a dumb character… it breaks all these stupid rules that Hollywood has for the sake of humor, and for the sake of jokes, and it’s a feel-good movie. Oh, man. I watch it over and over and over again. It’s got bits of Woody Allen’s kind of mysticalism, but it’s not. It’s jokey but the jokes don’t have punchlines. It’s like a Steve Martin album live, and they did a good job with making it a story. In a lot of ways you have no Borat without The Jerk, you have no anything, Lebowski; all those characters are Jerk-inspired. I play dumb quite a bit; I’ll say that right now. I don’t know if you call it a crutch, or what, but I tend to lean dumb… I don’t think I would have been able to get away with that had it not been for that movie."

"They’re a vocal group and started back in the heyday of very early reggae records. It’s the Jamaican parallel universe of rock & roll. It echoes rock & roll, R&B, Motown, soul. It has all the vocabulary of great 50s rock & roll. It’s pop music. It has this work ethic and immediacy: “We’re just making records, and making records, and making records.” It’s like surf music. It’s guys around the world in cheapo studios just digging deep. I love the vocalising of The Heptones. Even later records. I always loved them. I’m a sucker for the 60s records. All of their early records are singles. The first time they got compiled was probably the 70s. There’s one song called 'School Girls' that I almost covered a few years ago [Black essentially covers it for the Quietus there and then]. It’s so heartfelt and heartbroken. It’s like, it’s like, it’s like when I listen to 'The Great Pretender' [sings] “Oh yes! I’m the great pretender…” The Platters were a lot smoother than The Heptones. But The Heptones have that beautiful harmonising and soulfulness. Whenever I hear The Heptones I think, I wish I could sing that good. They do an amazing version of 'Knock On Wood'. They fuckin’ own it, man! It’s already a big hit for whoever the fuck recorded it. They sell it, they own it, they wear the hat."

"I was listening to this a lot when Supergrass were making Diamond Hoo Ha over in Berlin. This was the record of that album for me and I was listening to it over and over again. I love the rawness and the vocal performances. When I first heard it, it was unlike anything I'd ever heard before. It was different and I love Tom Verlaine's vocal quality; it's really androgynous and like the male Patti Smith. It had that delivery and I love it. I've never been drawn into the alternate tunings that they used and so I've never delved into that. I'm probably not enough of a nerd about other people's music to do that. But their playing is never pompous or self-indulgent. It wasn't guitar duelling but Television are very sensitive to their instruments. Everything had its place but I think I was drawn to it because of the band I was in. This was what we aspired to in terms of Mick [Quinn] being a brilliant bass player so we let him speak with what he was doing. And you couldn't tread over Danny because he had these amazing bass fills and we had that internal dialogue where everybody got to speak. The best bands are the ones that connect that way and are really on fire when there's that understanding between each other."