"Electro 1 represents the kickstart of that kind of music for me and a whole crew of mates. We were 13 or 14, this arty, conscientious little urban crew of kids just roaming around. It was fun, it was exciting because the music was really hard to get hold of, there was only one pirate radio station, I think it was Tim Westwood that did it. You had to tune into it on a Thursday at 4 o’ clock. They would play all these kinds of tunes, but no one else was into them. No one was into hip hop. Everyone else was into that gothy fucking angular stuff, whereas I didn’t know who The Smiths were until about four years ago. We were kind of early pioneers, well, not pioneers, we were rubbish Chiswick kids, trying to be a bit urban, adopting some of the clothes but quite naively. We all looked like total pricks. I always got it wrong and wore a chef’s hat or something. I was like the dude in the band that never looked quite right, the Gary Barlow one who doesn’t fit the clothes that the stylist’s picked out."

"This is my childhood in a nutshell. I grew up in a very instrumental house, full of musicians, and this was religious for us. Billy Cobham, Tony Williams, these were the pillars my dad raised us on. Total Eclipse, though… My dad had that album on vinyl, but me and my older brother we weren't allowed to touch the record player unless one of my parents were there. But my dad would go to work, and we would wait until he left and then we would put the record on. We would do all kinds of stupid stuff that kids do when they're playing vinyl; messing with the record, warping it, trying to scratch if it's hip hop, but we were really cautious not to literally put scratches in my dad's vinyl. We would listen to Billy Cobham, and my older brother was a drummer, so he was listening to this with a lot of intent. We were really young, and on that album the level of musicianship is absolutely amazing. It's one of those things that also inspired me to play my instrument the way I play."

"This is a bit of a sidestep, but in 1987 I went to the States on a Camp America. Me and my mate applied and we got in and he went to work in this really posh Jewish camp in Massachusetts somewhere, with all these lovely kids. I was working with these underprivileged kids from The Bronx, in Carmel in upstate New York. These kids were rough. I was 18 and they were like 12 and some of them were bigger than me. I shared a cabin with a guy called Daryl who was from New York. He just played the Run–D.M.C. album all day. Bigger And Deffer was out then too, the LL Cool J album. I just loved it. That was when I got into hip-hop. I wasn't sold on the music. I always thought it was a bit lumpy, before Public Enemy came out. It was missing a groove really. But 'It's Tricky' is really uptempo. It's really aggressive, which I liked. It's got that 'My Sharona' riff and that's not going to send you wrong is it? It sounded great in the house. It sounded so alien. My mum and dad didn't want to know and when you're that age you want to be freaking out the straights."

"Obviously, I'd been listening to hip hop since the mid-80s and kept half an eye on all that stuff as it grew. I was involved in rave culture really early, Spiral Tribe raves and stuff like that and clubbing in Leeds in the early 90s. There was always this really hard UK Garage sound that was great. I loved it. Wiley's come from being a kind of garage MC, one of those guys we listened to on pirate radio in Leeds. He's still got that really underground sound, the way he spits and he never loses that energy either. I was listening to his first album the other day and it still sounds like the future to me. It sounds so contemporary. When you actually analyse grime rhythms, a lot of it is from Nubian rhythms and a lot of the scales are Nubian scales, Algerian scales. When you hear grime, it just sounds like someone's car in the street in London. But then you analyse it and you realise there's all these global influences - it sounds like the whole world. This is what I wanted Melt Yourself Down to be. I wanted to try and create a sound that felt like the whole world."

"I’ve got three Pac albums on here, so we can consolidate two of them. Everyone knows I’m a super-duper Pac fan, but when Me Against The World dropped I was 10 years old. So even being 10 years old, I still knew the importance of this album. I knew how ill the shit he was saying was, and how emotional he sounded. I was ten years old, but I could connect to the dude. ""It’s like now, when I’m traveling on the road, a parent will bring their 11-year-old kid to me and say, ‘You’re his favorite rapper. He loves you.’ I’ll think, ‘Yo, he’s 11!’ I have to remember that when I was young, I got it too. I understood it. So it reminds me of that. It’s a classic. ‘Dear Mama’ is a fucking classic. The song ‘Me Against The World’ is a classic. ‘Temptations’ and ‘So Many Tears’ are my favorite songs on there.” ”As far as All Eyez On Me, that was the first double disc in hip-hop. The fact that he even had the fucking audacity to make a double disc. [Laughs.] And make both discs incredible and able to stand on their own two feet, that's crazy to me.”"

"I’ve got three Pac albums on here, so we can consolidate two of them. Everyone knows I’m a super-duper Pac fan, but when Me Against The World dropped I was 10 years old. So even being 10 years old, I still knew the importance of this album. I knew how ill the shit he was saying was, and how emotional he sounded. I was ten years old, but I could connect to the dude. ""It’s like now, when I’m traveling on the road, a parent will bring their 11-year-old kid to me and say, ‘You’re his favorite rapper. He loves you.’ I’ll think, ‘Yo, he’s 11!’ I have to remember that when I was young, I got it too. I understood it. So it reminds me of that. It’s a classic. ‘Dear Mama’ is a fucking classic. The song ‘Me Against The World’ is a classic. ‘Temptations’ and ‘So Many Tears’ are my favorite songs on there.” ”As far as All Eyez On Me, that was the first double disc in hip-hop. The fact that he even had the fucking audacity to make a double disc. [Laughs.] And make both discs incredible and able to stand on their own two feet, that's crazy to me.”"

"I think to this day that whole album, Fly Or Die is one of my top buys for so many reasons - every time I go back to it there's other things I hear in it. Even bigger than that, it was Pharrell and what he did with N/E*/R/D. It was the first thing that I identified with. I used to skateboard, and I always felt like what I was doing was ‘other’. And then I saw that and I was like ‘Oh. Sick.’ Someone gets it. There’s another black guy, skateboarding and they were into rap and hip hop and making beats and he plays drums. It was like there's room to do what I do, you know what I mean? This has never sounded old, like some records do. Some records of that era you listen back and they don’t age well. But I feel like that particular one, it's still very raw, still very honest. That was one of the first CDs I got in secondary school. My brother went to America and brought it back. And I was like ‘What dyou get for me?’ and he was like ‘Uhhhh... here.’ I’m glad I asked that question."