"This was the point where I did start to accept there were other kinds of music than the stuff I’d grown up with. Because I’d listened to so much hip hop and soul, I was very dismissive, even of Bowie. I never began to negotiate with that until I was much older. A real Velvet underground obsessive is less favourable to this album because it’s less pure in their eyes than the cold, earlier stuff, but it’s the first one that got me and drew me into that kind of music. It’s soulful as well. Lou Reed is brilliant. He’s a cunt, but he’s brilliant. I met him once, I did a TV show with him, Metallica and Lana Del Rey in France. It was the most awful panel of people I’d ever had to sit with. The only person that was nice was Lars from Metallica. They lined us all up and we had to stand and look as if we were all bonding. Lou Reed was like a melted mannequin, he had about four breaths left in him, while Lana Del Rey looked like someone had kidnapped everyone she knew. Lars had been to so many AA meetings he was all ‘Oh hey! So nice to meet you!’ Weirdly enough Lou and dad had a bit of a history, because dad’s only tour of America was with Lou Reed and they really hated each other. Lou hated everybody arbitrarily, and dad just hated America. I think that tour ended because dad knew Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood and they met them in LA. He complained about Lou Reed, so Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood went and de-tuned all of Lou Reed’s guitars."

"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."

"When Oasis first started, very early on we used to cover ‘Feel The Groove’ by Cartouche. There’s a tape of that live gig knocking about somewhere. I was the dance music head in the group. I was into indie music like everyone else, New Order, The Smiths and then one night in 1987 someone took me to the Hacienda because I’d been reading about this music and I just stood there, drinking Colt 45, thinking 'Well, this is shit…' But then someone else took me the week after and said, 'Have one of these.' And put a little pill in my hand. And within an hour I thought that this music was the greatest thing that I’d ever heard in my entire fucking life. It was a life changing experience. The thing about the Hacienda was it was a superclub before superclubs existed. Acid house only lasted two years and that was it at its best. If you go to a club now you might as well be listening to the same song all night. Back then they played everything, hip hop, electro, acid house, techno and it was all mashed up. It was on your doorstep and full of people who were skint. It was only two quid to get in, they sold Rizla behind the bar so you could skin up and acid and Es were just entering the cultural stream. They were the best years of my life and probably every other day since I’ve thought, 'I wonder what those tunes were called?' Then I heard this album was coming out, I put it on at home and I was instantly transported back into that nightclub. And I thank the people who put this album out. It reminds me of great days when I was young and enjoying life to the full."

"Lyrically Dizzee Rascal is phenomenal, and musically he's one of the most progressive, forward thinking grime artists and musicians of our time. He won the Mercury Prize over ten years [before Skepta], which says it all. This record was what I listened to when I was commuting to and from Slough, when I was just starting Gallows, I was listening to it nonstop. I've loved grime since I was young, I've always loved hip hop but grime was so quintessentially British, you couldn't have made it anywhere else. To me grime is punk, more now than ever. Punk to me was the sound of disenfranchised youth, and that's what grime is. You take everything away from young people and tell them what they can't do, at some point they're going to say 'yes we can', and that's what's happening now. They feel discriminated against and now they're making the right fucking decisions by showing that. I think it's a classic record. What's really nice to see is that back when this arrived on the scene it was still very much about beef in the grime scene, people were still writing diss tracks, whereas what's happened recently is that when he played those tenth anniversary shows you just see everybody celebrating it, celebrating the fact that here's an album that did so much over a decade ago, and now we've just had a second [grime Mercury Prize winner]. I love that, but my problem is that there haven't been more. I love that these are being used as bookmarkers, as milestones, but we need a lot more than that, more progressive, forward thinking, unique individuals. That's what the Mercury Prize is supposed to be for, though it misses more than it hits."