"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."