"It's not quite finished, and that's why it's a classic example of what they were becoming, and that's why I love it. I love coming across a record when you can hear what the band could become. Unfortunately with them, I don't think they really ever got there. For me, they could have been the British R.E.M.. I remember myself and Nick saw the band at WOMAD fest in 1986. We decided we had to go to one festival to see what everything was about - it was either '85 or '86 - and we saw James, when they'd just come out with 'Hymn From A Village', when they were a completely different band, and they were brilliant to be honest. We saw Siouxsie And The Banshees and Arrow, and I think The Housemartins were there, and we also saw The Blue Aeroplanes. They were fucking amazing; one of the best live bands I've ever seen. It was pre-Bez and they had a dancer with them onstage; he was called Wojtek [Dmochowski] and the singer was just scatting poetry over the music. For a band that made quite delicate music they were full-on, they were moving lots, it was just pure fully formed erudite freneticism. It was just lovely. We came away thinking, "Wow, we'd love to be in a fucking band who connect onstage like that, with what's in their music and really physically trying to impose yourself on an audience." I love this record because it's got a song on it called 'Arriving', which has the line: "I saw the sun shimmering on a broken breeze." Nick was obsessed with that line when he was young. There's another song called 'When The Wave Comes' which is beautiful, the actual song 'Tolerance' is just brilliant. It's not a perfect album but you can hear this promise of what this band could have been. Me and Nick went to this festival and we fucking hated the experience of going to this festival, we hated people were trying to sell us drugs, but we loved seeing The Blue Aeroplanes. It was a little Damascene moment which made us really, truly believe about how physical a gig could be. We were determined to not be a band that stood still and just looked at our feet or guitar fretboards after that; we were determined that we would move round shitloads. We walked away quite loftily saying, "We're never coming back to a festival unless we play one," which just shows how snotty and fucking deluded we were."

"This era of the Velvet Underground is possibly, along with Ray Davies, my favourite kind of singing. It’s sort of weedy and again without testosterone and certainly without force, it was just very, very hip and not trying too hard. It’s interesting, because did a band ever sound as hip, not trying, but still delivering? “Velvet Underground were a real staple of my generation, in that a bunch of kids in the mid-70s’ discovered them retrospectively, probably in a way that I’d imagine kids now discover The Smiths. They sounded genuinely subversive without being obscure, they were real, proper songs and there was a great poetry in there. “Often when you talk about songs to people, most people assume you’re talking about the words - to a lot of people that’s what a song is. But because I got so obsessed so young with the mechanics of the music, the production and how things came together, often I wasn’t really too bothered if the words didn’t make much sense. I’ve had amazing experiences with songs that had words that absolutely didn’t make any sense, like ‘Jeepster’. “‘Foggy Notion’ is a really good example of a song that’s just really rocking - the guitar is really hyped up and swings like crazy - that makes you feel really good and absolutely doesn’t need any serious lyrical content. In fact, sometimes - and I suspect it’s the case with ‘Foggy Notion’ because I know it so well - if the lyrics were snagging your attention too much it would distract from what it’s supposed to do. You’ve got to remember it was for young people in the 60s’ to Frug to, doing these dance moves in cool striped-shirts and cool shades and ‘Foggy Notion’ is all about that and the sound of the voice. I think that’s a great thing and something people who think songs are entirely about meaning and words aren’t aware of. “It’s an interesting thing with The Velvet Underground, because if you imagine The Rolling Stones back then, who were supposedly the baddest of the bad boys and The Beatles who were supposed to be the hippest and most worldly, I wonder what they made of The Velvets at the time or if they’d heard them. I know Dylan was aware of them, but writing songs like ‘Heroin’ and ‘The Black Angel's Death Song’, I wonder if you were in The Beatles or The Stones you were just going ‘Oh no, we’re so X-Factor.’"

"I could name a whole lot of well-known artists from anywhere in the world who have made great records but maybe it's more interesting if I pick up on things that I've grown up with that, for geographical reasons, aren't known much outside this particular Welsh language culture. These records aren't talked about everyday in the English language. Someone like Geraint Jarman, with Datyblgu, might be the most powerful Welsh language music [of its time]. He is from a generation earlier [to Datyblgu] and started releasing solo albums in the mid-1970s. He was part of the folk movement in the late-1960s and was in a band with Meic Stevens and Heather Jones called Baramenyn. They were making almost pastiche folk music that was critical of folk music but the records were really popular! They were almost like Os Mutantes without the fuzz! Geraint was a poet first and wrote really good poems like Gil Scott-Heron. He had those skills which he applied to rock music in the mid-1970s. He also had an amazing band who could record an album in a couple of days and an amazing guitarist called Tich Gwilym. This album is like a mid-1970s rock album but informed by punk - Television are in there, too - but it's got that grounding in songwriting from the folk days as well. You can get lost in the guitar playing as well and the lyrics are risqué for the community he was singing to at the time - Wales was quite a religious place in a non conformist way. But it's not kitsch music, it's very much engaging with its day and Geraint grew up in urban Cardiff in a Welsh speaking family but with connections to the Romany world. Like a lot of bands from elsewhere in Wales at the time, he was part of a multi-cultural society, a lot of his friends from school were in reggae bands and he gradually got more and more into reggae. You can hear this in this record but it's also a rock record. By the end of the 1980s, he was playing at Reggae Sunsplash so it's interesting...he was still [singing] in the Welsh language! He's still singing and putting records out. He also pioneered a Welsh television show called Fideo 9 which was like Snub TV or something and he put a lot of energy into that. He was also the voice of the cartoon character Super Ted!"

"I heard 'Novocaine For The Soul' on the radio and bought the album the very next day. And with their second record, I got it expecting more of the same. This was pre-internet, so there wasn't a lot of information about it, but it would appear that he lost his sister and mum, and so he wrote this record about being in hospital and watching people die. It was extremely sad, and for a teenager it was like, ""Holy shit! What is this?!"" Kids are always intrigued by sob stories of one kind or another - Nirvana being a perfect example - but this guy had clearly been through a lot. He writes very short and simple yet very affecting songs, not produced in a twee way, but very cold and using lots of samples. They didn't really sound like a band at all. Again, they were a three-piece, and a very simple band. He had a really cool voice and a story to tell, and that again really made me think about the fact that the band doesn't have to be that thing which I always thought they were: that you played your drums and you play your bass, when actually it can be anything you want. That really influenced the way I write music. I used a lot more technology after I got into that album. I started to integrate my live sounds - my guitar for example - with my laptop, and I started using a lot more sampling, thinking I want to be a lot more like Eels. I think an element of his very black humour has crept into my music. You always get the sense that he is talking about something very grave, but he does so in a slightly distracting way. Take 'Susan's House': it's got this ridiculous, quite clearly silly motif, which sounds like Neighbours - he knows it does! He's talking about his problems at Susan's house as he's walking past all these awful things in the street, like a kid who has been shot and a pregnant teenager, but it's couched in this happy, jaunty, slightly sarcastic world, and that is precisely where I'm at in my own music. Like the song 'Get To Heaven' is all about the same thing, walking past horrors but with a smile on your face, whistling a jaunty tune. I think a lot of influence came from Mr Everett, because of his outlook on life, where you can be in a very dark position but music doesn't have to abide by those rules, it can subvert it."

"I wasn't sure if I should put this song in, I was wondering if I should make weirder choices but then I was just like "fuck it!" It's one of the best songs ever, I go back to it again and again and again, and it always feels so good. There's something so satisfying about it – the way the chords change and the meaning of the lyrics. Isn't it about the Kinks' manager hooking up with a girl who was actually a guy dressed as a girl? It's such a cool thing to write a song about, but it's really subtle. Unless you listen carefully, you don't really notice that that's what it's about. I love songs that have a secret meaning. It's so simple, but so satisfying. It's also a very beautifully written song with the way the melodies go and the way the key changes. But because it's the Kinks it has this really cool ugly, rough sound that makes it feel so much cooler. The best songs are the ones that are beautifully written, but recorded in a dirty way. I'm always looking for ways to make our songs more interesting. If you just play all the chords and everything is perfectly in tune and in time, the music is whitewashed and comes out as a straight line. It's boring. Soph and I are always faffing around with guitar parts and trying to find ways to make them less in tune, or less pretty. You can have the most basic song, but if you cover it in stuff that's a little bit discordant or a little bit weird it makes it all so much more interesting. I couldn't really say when I first heard ‘Lola’. It's one of those ones where you're just born and you know it. I didn't go and buy it in a second-hand shop or anything like that. I don't know where that came from, I don't even know when that started but I've got a few Kinks records and I really love them. I got a big record dump from one of my best friend's dads when I was a teenager. He's been really influential actually, he gave me so much music. My music collection was just there suddenly, a big stack. There was loads of Motown stuff like Smokey Robinson, The Temptations, The Supremes and Marvin Gaye. He used to be a Northern Soul DJ in Yorkshire or somewhere and he's just a cool dude – maybe I first heard the Kinks because of him."