"I heard this through a journalist, Michael Azerrad, he's a good guy. We started direct messaging on Facebook or I met him, I don't know what happened, and he said, ""You should listen to this"" and then I got it. He said that you're either going to love it or it'll feel like you're getting punished by having water dripped on your head! And I said, ""Perfect, I'll do that!"" It's incredible; once again, I watched it on YouTube, him performing in Japan, like, ""Fuck, really?! You can do this live?!"" Also, I just like the atonal thing of it and what they get from composing. It's very neutral. I actually used it, it's a total influence, you can totally hear it, on 'Birthday Video', it's on Weeds. I layered a lot of guitars and to my surprise, a lot of these noises start coming through, these sympathetic notes, and I was like, ""Wow-whee! This is cool!"" Totally taken from him, I hear it plain as day. I also got his box set, it's great. He's always got some kind of concept to it. He wrote one for what it would be like on a train ride to the Holocaust [Different Trains], to reach finality. He's got all these studies, drums, all sorts of percussion, but ...18 Musicians, I love it, I listen to it in my bunk in the bus!"

"The beats on this are really good. You've got Dirty Danger on there as well and a few other guys. Grime wasn't being lorded at this time, it wasn't glamorous, it wasn't in vogue and that's what I like. You can feel that in these recordings. Today's stuff is still good. I bought Giggs' album the other day, Landlord, that's really good. I was going to buy Stormzy's but after last night at the Brits, I don't know now! I can't believe he went on stage with Ed Sheeran. Call me closed minded but I just thought, mate, what are you doing? He's got a really good flow but he needs to live a bit more for those words to ring true. Even with Skepta's early work you can hear he's hungry for it."

"I found out about Leonard Cohen from Nirvana, from Pennyroyal Tea. I was vastly too young and I didn't understand [his music] at the time, but you still want to be into what's 'in' and it's tough to make such bold strides, whether you understand it subconsciously or not. When you've got someone that has a voice, that voice only gets better with age and… fuck, there's so much character on this record. It was a tough album to listen to after he died, the same with Bowie's Blackstar. When you go back into a record and listen to someone talk about mortality on a level where they're really trying to understand it because it's imminent… that's an intense listen. There's been a lot of media attention because of his passing, and I got to catch some documentaries on his life with some really beautiful moments I'd never seen before. There's a show he was playing in a university for this crowd. He walks off and is out the back smoking, and they're chanting his name but he's got nothing left to play. He walks back out and he's crying, playing one more thing, and everything's silent as he's still drying his tears, overwhelmed by this love from strangers."

"I really like the Elton John thing. Axl was really into that kind of shit, and it really comes out in that tune. He gets a bit, 'Oh woah is me,' but you can't really fault the tune. It's got some great lines in it, he's got a great voice, and he's got a real ear for melody. it's not just punk rock and metal - he really can sing! He also made you feel like it must be quite shit to be a massive rock star, that it's not all it's cracked up to be, which I thought was good. He was one of the first people to say, 'look, I'm struggling with this.' Before Axl, people had been like, 'Hey! Everything's glitzy, everything is alright!"", and he wasn't like that. Then obviously Kurt Cobain took it to a whole new level."

"It's really weird: I kind of had a bit of a problem with The Teardrop Explodes. I really didn't like them as a group, and it's very strange because our recording desk in Cardiff… I think Kilimanjaro was recorded on it. But as soon as Julian Cope left Teardrop Explodes I just completely turned onto him, and especially this record, because it's brilliant. There's some benchmark songs on here, which are hard for anybody to top. There's one called 'Bill Drummond Said' which is just fucking brilliant, and there's a song called 'Reynard The Fox', which is just… he does such a brilliant job of having a narrative of why he disagrees with something but pitching it in such a beautiful way. And there's 'The Bloody Assizes'; Julian Cope, now, has this afterlife of being this writer who seems to mix the high-rise block of ideas in his head with reality. It's really amazing. And he's become some sort of historian about myth and Krautrock, and I loved one of his quotes when he did an interview for this book: "I only look like this because I feel like such a cunt when I'm crying inside all the time." This record shows why he's such a brilliant solo artist. It's got a lovely, bucolic flintiness to it. There's something about it; you realise he's detached himself from his previous life and The Teardrop Explodes, and he's just out there in the woods doing something. And you cannot like a record which has a cover of the artist's… you know. Naked inside a big turtle shell on the cover. I remember it got really mixed reviews, but I think a lot of people do consider it a classic. I do; he's done other good stuff, but it's his best record."

"Nick Cave is one of these very rare male artists that has managed to hold my attention and interest over the course of four decades now. He is extraordinary and continues to push his artistry and has never cheapened himself or been a desperate gambler in Vegas. In regards to his musical career, he's always just done what he does, so beautifully, with no compromise to the musical climate. As a result, [he] has created his own genre, really, that he is king of. His career is just continuing to blossom and continuing to grow. It has this incredible reach now and is touching new generations. 

 He is one of the greatest artists, storytellers and musicians that I have ever met and have ever been around. I feel lucky to be here to enjoy his work and I'm so grateful that somebody like him is out there still. He is this incredible answer or rebuke to the current climate of just completely vacuous people-pleasing pop music. 

 He's a truly incredible wordsmith too and he is really blessed with the true greatness of a writer. He's not a pop lyricist by any stretch of the imagination: he's a great erudite communicator and you can feel that in his music, in his lyrics, in his books, in his scripts. He's bordering bona fide genius with his words – just so poetic and so very honest and authentic. 

 Each record is a logical sort of expansion from the previous record, but he's a great storyteller, and a great communicator, and a great connector too. I can't think of anyone else who has the kind of career he has, where he's never had a hit – not really, in the traditional sense of a hit – and yet enjoys this phenomenal career where he's now selling out fucking arenas around every corner of the world. I mean, it's mad. 

 He's so unique and just doesn't sound like anybody else. He's got this phenomenal band too in The Bad Seeds whose musicianship is just incredible. It's like going in to listen to an orchestra because it's so emotive and powerful: to see him live is truly extraordinary."