"This is another case of, "Where's my Radiohead gone?" Hearing Muse for the first time was like, "Holy shit, this is like Radiohead, but heavier, and more pop, but also darker as well", and I just absolutely fell for it, hook, line and sinker. I was at the perfect age, was just getting into actually being good at playing stuff, and Matt Bellamy was all over the place in terms of his musical talents, playing the piano and guitar, and stuff that teenagers love. Stuff that sounds flashy and complex and twiddly but is actually not. And the bass player! Fuck me, the basslines on the album! Bass players don't do that kind of stuff! He's the sort of main character in an awful lot of those songs. It was an absolute revelation. I was a bass player before I was anything else, and I remember thinking, "Holy shit that sounded ace"! They ripped up the rulebook in so many ways for rock music. It was so enjoyable as well. Every song had a real sense of performance and razzmatazz. Of course it's called Showbiz and it is a type of show. So I think, more than anything, that's probably what you would say about my band, particularly live - we're not subtle, it's over the top. Whether people like it or not, that's got into us now and it's hard to take a step back."

"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."

"I first heard this record when I was eight or something. I think my mum gave it to me and I listened to it everyday. It replaced The Jackson Five's Dancing Machine that I used to dance to all the time before that. Then I started running home to this Annie album instead. I had so much fun singing along to it and I learnt all the songs. Then I got the leading part in the musical Annie in my school, so it was really the start of my career. I didn't think so much about the lyrics but I knew that my home life was not very happy. I mean, even though I felt very loved by my mother and always had a connection with her, and we have a really similar sense of humour, the song 'Maybe' really connected with me, it was my favourite one to sing. You know: "Maybe my parents could be like this, or maybe they could be like that." My sister always told me I was adopted, which wasn't true but I wished it was because my dad was so mean that I would always be like, "Maybe he's not really my dad". So I really related to that song, imagining actually having a happy childhood. Imagining having parents who were happy and in love and really loved me. I related to that sense of longing but I didn't really know why. I didn't think, "It's because my dad is abusive and drunk"; I didn't think that far ahead, I just sort of intuitively connected to that song."