"This is Aaron Bruno’s solo proect. I put this on the list because I’ve been listening to it recently. I tend to find an album that is eclectic enough to keep me interested and I listen to it over and over again, obsessing over it… and then I stop. And I just stopped with this! Ha ha! Well, I’ll probably give it a bit of space and then come back to it. I try and listen to new music as much as I can, but that’s probably the first genuinely eclectic new album that I’ve enjoyed in years. The story goes that somebody in Texas played one of the album tracks and it’s caught on and everybody’s playing it now on their radio stations. And it’s become a sort of mega hit. To me there is some stuff on it that sounds like the Pixies and some stuff that sounds like The Beatles, but it’s all slightly electronic and his voice is great. There’s loads of obviously ad-libbed stuff that they’ve kept in and it’s very cool. Rough round the edges in the right way. It’s not guitar heavy, but there is some really great live drumming happening in it. I think he’s a surfing man who’s influenced by hardcore and stuff like that, but some of it’s very poppy. I think it’s just a guy who is not afraid to explore songs and take them where they feel like they should go, rather than worry about what it’s supposed to sound like. It’s the best new album I’ve heard in years."

"A dirty sexy rock & roll track from the future: that was my concept of it when I first heard it. At the time when he wrote it, it sounded pretty far out from anything he had written before. So, the challenge was finding an approach that would fit with the other songs we'd be doing. He'd write on a 12-string guitar mainly, so it always had a little bit of a folky element to it. It would sound like it came from a folk singer, but we knew it wasn't going to come out like a folk song so we would have to figure out how to break it down into a rock & roll context. Those are the things that would go through our heads as a band, and that one was, lyrically, summing up the whole Ziggy thing. You know: 'I'm an alien' and just the atmosphere around it. And when Mick Ronson did his solo on it, that was a new kind of solo. I think he used an echoplex thing, where it sort of went round on a tape machine and kept going and going and then he played on top of it – and it was pretty freaky! Pretty far out to play along with! The whole thing sounded as big as the universe while you were playing, but you had to keep grounded, keep that solid beat going and not be affected. Then when we heard it back it was like 'wow!' It went to the stars, but we still had our feet on the ground."

"Anyone who knows me is aware that I am obsessed with rock and roll. I have thousands and thousands of LPs, CDs, and shelves of DVDs. Monterey Pop is one of the DVDs that I play the most, especially the disc featuring Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding. Hendrix is a guitar colossus so relaxed during his first American concert that he’s chewing gum. I love his groovy raps, the intro to “Like a Rolling Stone.” One of my all-time favorites, Otis Redding, with Booker T. and the MG’s, plays a ferocious and ultratight set that to me says that this is one of the greatest groups of all time, at their absolute peak. Months on the road hone “Shake” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” into a pair of definitive performances. The box set allows us to witness the beginning of the era of great live rock. All the bands are about the same age and at the same point in their careers, all facing a similar aesthetic problem. Formed in dance halls and clubs around the U.S. and Britain, they were trying to capture the excitement and power of their live performances on LP. The camera captures them in the moment of creation, playing for the approval of each other. Their sincerity, honesty, and devotion to the musicianship could not be any more different from the state of music today. For me the glorious catharsis of the Who’s “My Generation” is one of the things that make life worth living."

"This takes me back to when we were on tour in America with The Bends, and we had all our equipment stolen. We only had three days to buy more. I remember Jonny and I travelling into this guitar shop in San Francisco, where I saw this Telecaster Strat I fell in love with, then me, Colin, Jonny, our soundman and our tech hiring this van to drive six hours north. We had only one cassette to play in it, which had Swervedriver's Ejector Seat on one side and Marvin Gaye's What's Going On on the other. I'd never heard it before. I was like, what is this? Oh my God! All I knew about Marvin Gaye was that he'd been involved in Motown. After this, I got trainspotterish about the album, and its band, The Funk Brothers, and how they made music.

This was really influential on the way I made music from that point. Before that, my bands were Pixies, Nirvana, The Posies and other grunge stuff, but I'd more or less reached a saturation point with all that by 1995. Hearing What's Going On? was like suddenly hearing music in five dimensions; it really made me think about how I wanted to contribute sonically to OK Computer. I thought 'Inner City Blues' was the greatest song I'd ever heard in my life, and it's still up there for me. This music felt like truth. It elevated and transported me. It was music that made me love the music I was trying to make."

"This was a great time for Iggy Pop. He'd been through a lot but this particular time period, things really seemed to work for him. And I like the exploration of early synths here as well. You've got a song like 'The Endless Sea' which has the over-loud synths. I'd have turned them down a little bit but it's great because it's really in-your-face and you can really hear the excitement of the guys getting hold of a Moog. There's an innocence here coupled with an early discovery of stuff. And this album is more about the songs. I don't know if it's a case of something being overplayed but I much prefer listening to this than say, 'The Passenger' or 'Lust For Life'. Maybe it's because those songs are always on and they're just overplayed - and they are brilliant and amazing songs - but there's a tightness about New Values, especially in the drum sound. They've obviously come back from Hansa and the open room, which is a sound that people have tried to emulate over the years, to do something different. Certainly when you look at albums like this, Horses and Marquee Moon, Supergrass were really trying to channel that '75-'79 period and that edgy punkiness but with elements of sophistication. I bought a Telecaster Deluxe guitar in the late 90s and I was really chuffed to get it because it was probably played by one of those musicians from that time period."

"This was on the soundtrack of Luke Cage, which me and my missus watched quite a lot, it’s a cool series and there’s great music on that show. I first heard this track years ago, but when I heard it again on Luke Cage it reminded me to go and root out the record. “It’s a beautiful snippet of a sort of souly… actually ‘souly’ is the wrong word, I don’t like the word souly, it gives me the wrong image! It’s a beautiful little instrumental moment with these wonderful female vocals doing their thing, they’re almost like Disney vocals. ‘Cristo Redentor’ is a really cool bit of music, I hear something like this and I get inspired and think ‘I want to have a female vocal that does that kind of thing’ or ‘I want that air and space to the bass guitar’, where it sounds like it’s not just DI’ed in but it’s got this roominess to it. It’s quite often sonic things that I hear; where I’ll hear something and think it’s right up my street sonically or it’s the combination of instruments. “There’s such a great tone and vibe to this. I was listening to stuff like this when I was making the record, these sort of moments, like how Hip Hop uses old moments from soul records, that kind of approach. I think production-wise a lot of that stuff is amazing, there’s instruments like glockenspiels and it’s quite orchestral but with this great undertone - it’s different, there’s a dirty rawness about it."

"I'd only heard the singles on the radio in America, and my mother happened to be going to Germany. I said to her: "Get me any copies you can of Jimi Hendrix." Because I loved the shiny covers that you guys got in Europe, unlike the crappy covers we got. This was 1967. The first time I heard him was 'Hey Joe', on the radio. The playing was so fluid. I kept wondering how many people there were in the band. I got to meet them on their very first tour. [He pulls out his phone, and shows a photo of Hendrix, taken on Febuary 28 1968, at a club in Madison, Wisconsin, followed by a photo of the poster for the gig, at which he was supported by Soft Machine]. It was $3.50 to get in, and I got to see two shows - a six o'clock and a 9.30 show. The photo is backstage at that show. I was thinking: "Man, a guy who looks that cool …" It was the best ever show. I've been around so long that I ended up knowing the guy who was his bodyguard - he worked for us for a while. He wasn't a sweet guy, he was a "sleep with the fishes" kind of guy. He said he used to go out with Jimi and they would goof off, and there was nothing mysterious about him. Hendrix had it all: the voice, the songwriting, the guitar playing, and the weirdness. He was from outer space."