"I’m a huge Oasis fan. I saw Supersonic a couple of months ago and I loved it. I like seeing Liam and Noel interact when they talk to each other because they’re clearly brothers, they go at each other and they’re funny, some of what they say is really articulate, some of it is completely at loggerheads. I remember I was in Los Angeles, heading to the studio listening to the K-Rock radio station and they said “Here’s the new song by a British band called Oasis” and ‘Live Forever’ came on and I just loved it, I turned it up really loud in the car. It’s the guitar riff and the sentiment behind the lyrics, but the second I heard Liam singing he was just going for it. He’s got one of the greatest rock voices there is, there’s a kind of sneer almost in the way he sings, it’s all attitude. Live Forever’ was my first impression of Oasis and it’s the template for what makes Oasis sound like Oasis. I love the tone and Noel’s guitar and I like the chord progression, but to me what makes Oasis Oasis is Liam’s singing. The songs that Noel sang are lovely, but he doesn’t have that same bravado that Liam has. It was a combination of the two of them, but it definitely needed Liam’s vocals out front and centre for the kind of attitude and swagger that he would bring to the song. Again, when I heard it I was ‘damn, I wish I’d written that song.’ It’s got a killer guitar riff and the chord progression is good. It’s dead simple and like most Oasis songs they’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, in fact usually Noel would admit he was just trying to write a good Beatles rip-off song!"

"The reason I love this record, apart from it being an absolutely incredible record, is that up until hearing Marquee Moon I wrote songs on my own and when it came to putting things together with a band, I would always have in my mind that I would play chords and then break for a solo and then have some more chords. A friend of mine who is a great guitarist himself asked me whether I had heard a song called 'Marquee Moon' and suggested we try learning the guitar parts together. We sat down like teenagers and tried to learn them. I suddenly realised that you can have loops of really intricate riffs – it doesn't have to be just chords and solos. So, Marquee Moon changed my attitude to arranging - in terms of the guitars - a song. But then, weirdly, after that the track 'Marquee Moon' began to haunt me out. I had some gigs in Australia and Brazil and I figured out that if the record company gave me a round-the-world ticket it would be cheaper for them and also mean I could go to places like Thailand and Chile in between the tour. And every single place I went I would hear the track 'Marquee Moon' being played on local radio stations. It started to become really, really creepy. So, when I came back from the tour I thought I better buy the bloody record as it was haunting me. I found it for a quid in a charity shop as if everything was lining up for me to listen to this record in its entirety. And I did, thankfully, and it has just really changed my attitude to playing guitar and how I could structure things differently in terms of guitar playing."

"I think I discovered that record when I was in seventh grade. It's like a perfect album, from beginning to end, which is a difficult thing to achieve. I've been a fan of AC/DC for years. Highway To Hell is another record I think is pretty perfect. That record was so huge and it hit so hard, it was a kind of bookmarker in your life, for me and millions of people. Oddly enough we went through a few things that they had to. Down the road we would go through the loss of a member and make a decision to continue on and do it successfully. I thought it was such a brave thing for AC/DC to triumph over that sort of tragedy [the death of singer Bon Scott in 1980], to continue to have their sound, and also to have Brian on such a fucking impactful record - it’s obviously charged with a ton of emotion from losing Bon. That process, it was a fairly quick change. Brian wasn't trying to sound like Bon, but it's still AC/DC. Our band is a kind of parallel in a way. When I started I was more of a rhythm player in whatever band I played in, so I really identified with Malcolm [Young], yet I was wanting to play lead like Angus. He's a phenomenal lead player, but I've always thought the backbone of band is the rhythm guitar. I guess a lot of the bands that I like are dual guitar bands. And I actually really wanted another guitar player in this band when we first started, but the other guys didn't want one, so I had to learn to play a little bit [laughs]."

"I remember the exact moment I learned to play this song. It was at my great aunt’s house in Dunstable, Massachusetts. She lived in this old house on a farm and there was this old mouldy, mildewy, acoustic guitar there. “There wasn’t much else to do and I learned to play “Wild Thing” on the guitar. My cousin showed me how to play it and I was hooked, I could sing and play it at the same time and it was like ‘This is amazing.’ I rode a 300cc motorcycle around the backyard and played that guitar. “But the one that really changed the game for me was “Louie Louie”, which was E, A, B Minor. It’s got this sinister, evil vibe to it but it’s very subtle, and the artist in me responded to the drama of the B Minor. Also, it was the fact that the lyrics are incoherent. Apparently, nobody really knows the true lyrics to that song and with “Louie Louie” you can mumble the words, so that was great. “I’m always thinking back to the moment where I realised that was what I wanted to do, ‘When was it and what happened?’ I think it was much later, when I had a cassette deck that had this mic mix feature, where you could plug a microphone in and overdub onto your song. When I started screwing with that, that’s when I think I got the bug. I became obsessed with it and it felt like there was endless potential there. “Louie Louie” is a very historical song, so I chose that as my first. I like to think it’s the first song I really liked to play, because “Wild Thing” was too easy maybe. ‘Mythical’ is a great word for “Louie Louie”, it’s got that folklore to it"

"I chose a live album because you can hear where East meets West. It's obvious Ravi's known for his traditional music with Indian instruments. But with Inside The Kremlin he has the strings going. He's got a very orchestrated formality to mix in with his own Indian-tempered scale melodies. You can also hear the giant strings very clearly, so for me this is heaven. You've got the Indian modality mixed in with classical music. It's part of where we learned to orchestrate - where you can hear the sitars, for instance. It didn't take long for us to think, hey, this is how you put a cool guitar, strings or oboe piece together! Before that - and the same happened on Ocean Rain by Echo & The Bunnymen - it was the first time in a long time that we began to suss out this orchestration thing; it's not rocket science! I know the composers seem like they're physicists but if we can just take the melodies we can already play on the guitar and we put them on these classical instruments, that's orchestration, isn't it? We didn't have to be Mozart to do this. But in my case, this is where I began to figure some of these things out, certainly with Ocean Rain and Ravi Shankar. When I was in The Flaming Lips making the In A Priest Driven Ambulance album, it was very similar in that there was a guitar melody, but there were also strings doing it. That led to the beginnings of the orchestration in Mercury Rev as well as Flaming Lips. Listen to Ravi Shankar, and then listen to modern Bollywood - that's the Western or Hollywood side of Eastern music."