"This is one of the first songs I can remember listening to over and over again as a little kid. I had ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ and ‘Without You’ and they were my two favourite songs. I remember I would sit on the living room floor with my dad’s big headphones on, we had a massive CD player set and I would put it on and I’d just be… [gasps] I’d listen to it on repeat. “That was my first love of a pop ballad and I think those feelings were my first feelings of love in a way. I would just play it over and over and I think that was my first longing for wanting to create, but maybe not knowing that yet. Just being like ‘Oh my god, this is what I love.’ “It’s quite cool that it was Harry Nilsson, because I was just listening to what my parents were listening to at that time. I fucking love Harry Nilsson, he’s one of my favourite artists. Mariah Carey is a diva and she kills it, but it’s a different experience with the Mariah version. I love a diva and I love a good belt and an intense dramatic thing, but I like the more understated, simpler versions of things sometimes too. It’s like the Dolly Parton version of ‘I Will Always Love You’, there’s something so fucking beautiful and understated about that.”"

"Somebody gave it to me in the late nineties, just on a blank cassette and then yep, I was completely dubious, because when people mention Miles Davis or jazz in general, I would just think of those crazy funk-jazz things they did in the seventies, and I didn't know he was capable of this incredible orchestral soundscape. It helps that he's reading from an already fantastic piece of music but what he did to it was astonishing again, so I love it. It's just the most evocative record. Recently I had the pleasure of a train journey from Bilbao to Madrid and I put that on my headphones and it was like, "oh yeah, everything is cool". Actually, it didn't [unveil new layers to the record], as I think it was really cool to experience it on the train going through Spain and yet I always think that music is so powerful that the images that you have in your head if you're listening to it in your bedroom are as powerful, if not more so, than if you were in some incredible vista. After that I went back and bought the early Blue Note records, which are generally brilliant. I'm not a real jazz aficionado and if I've put on an old jazz record, it's mostly about mood, because I can't really understand what's going on. Whereas with Sketches Of Spain, it seems more orchestral, where I can understand what's going on better."

"It was probably one of the first times I picked up some listening headphones in Spillers Records in Cardiff, and I was looking for a gift for my best friend. I knew [Hans-Joachim Roedelius' band] Cluster existed but I was never really a fan – I hadn't found the time to get into them. So, I didn't know anything about who Roedelius was, but I was really intrigued by this record. I listened to it and it was absolutely incredible. I bought it for my friend and then realised that I had to have it for myself, so I went back the next day to get myself a copy. It's been an important record for me because it was the first time I heard a record that included synth and pianos and percussion and that was mechanical in parts but also very beautiful in others. It was the first time I started to visualise arrangements on different instruments and started to exit the view that everything had its place. The album has beautiful recurring themes that sweep in and out of the record. So for me, I could hear things mathematically but it also made me think about how you can piece music together as well. It's beautiful and some of the songs are playful - one of them sounds like the theme to an awful TV cop drama - but it then evolves into these beautiful soundscapes. A song like 'Le Jardin' just transports you to this different place. I always want a song that can remove you from your current situation."

"I don't think I can explain how significant that record was to me. And the more I travel through my life as a musician, the more I find myself coming back to it again and again. My mom had a giant stack of vinyl – mostly classical, with a few rock records. When I was seven or eight years old and started listening to music by myself, that album became the daily soundtrack to my life. I would ask someone to put the record player on for me and I would sit there with big headphones one, listening, and having the record flipped over again and again and again. I would put the music on and just stare at the cover for 45 minutes. The artwork was so important. Sgt Pepper's was full of lyrics I could understand, stories I could follow, music that just made complete sense to me. I understood all of it, and it took me into a world. I think that was the first time I really fell in love with a record. I loved 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' and 'She's Leaving Home', but one of my favourites was the opening track. What I really wanted – what I still want – was to feel like I was at some amazing happening. As a seven-year-old fantasising about being a rockstar, which I was just starting to do, every time I listened to that opening track, I imagined that somewhere there's this group of people in this psychedelic wonderland listening to the Beatles. I didn't have any clue who the Beatles were or what they meant, I didn't have any fucking context. I just knew that if there was a party, this was the one I wanted to be at."

"I'm pretty good friends with Egon who was the A&R guy for Stones Throw. Maybe it's no wonder the albums leaked in unfinished form because he'd send me beat tapes that J Dilla and Madlib would make. You'd get his CD with hundreds of tracks from J Dilla - they're all online now - and the same kind of thing for Madlib. You got the sense that those guys were always making beats. And when Donuts got released, it basically had all the best stuff from those beat tapes. But it's amazing to me how coherent they are and how well they work as an album - from what were seemingly unrelated two-minute snippets of instrumental hip-hop loops. It resonates with me as an album. It's turned me on to so much of the music that he sampled. At the time I was really into finding records with drum breaks and records with samples - that's how I made a lot of my music back then, was out of those records. He got me into that Dionne Warwick track 'You're Gonna Need Me' that he samples on Donuts. That's such an amazing track and he turned me on to that. He turned me on to the Eddie Kendricks record, People… Hold On, which is another one of my absolutely favourite records. He got me back into 10cc. It's also that aspect, of being a doorway into other things. We were on tour loads that year and we never, ever listened to music as a band. There was either silence, or people working on their own music on headphones or listening to stuff or doing whatever. But those two records [Donuts and Madvillainy] we could agree upon, and we'd listen to them over and over."

"My eldest brother had Closer. I was listening to that from about ten-years-old onwards. Once I started to save money – working on a farm with my other brother, doing the milk round with him – that was the first time I had my own cash floating around and that money used to go on records. Unknown Pleasures was one of my first purchases. That was a key moment for me. It was my record. It hadn't been passed down. It was a completely new record in the household. That was me getting that experience first-hand, and it was such a brilliant record to have that with. The sleeve is another Peter Saville classic. The production on it is incredible. I know the band weren't happy with it, but to me it's a complete masterpiece. The use of space is evocative of Lancashire I think. The whole thing has this dank… I'm going to wheel out all the clichés now about empty warehouses and all that, but it is familiar territory for me where I'm from. Those smashed glasses at the end of 'I Remember Nothing', and the synth drones. I think that was around the time I got my first Roland synthesiser and it was another polarising moment. Something very powerful crystallised about what I wanted to do at that point. All I was capable of doing with that synth was making this huge powerful drone sound. It pointed the way. Having that induction – sat with the headphones on late at night... Music in the seventies was full of opposites. The stuff we heard on the radio was the friendly aspects of music. I wasn't looking for that. I was looking to be disturbed by it and that's something that I haven't really lost throughout my life."