"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."

"The reason I chose “Temptation” was because it gave me the confidence to write a song called “Pure”. I’d made my first album and it was quite difficult, because I didn’t have a band and I’d recorded it all at home. I was lucky in that it had done quite well and “Pure” had been in the charts in America and stuff like that, but I felt like I didn’t quite know what to do. It didn’t feel right to just hire a load of musicians and have a band that wasn’t really a band. Then I heard “Eye Know” by De La Soul and it was the first time that I’d heard people sampling records and using beats, I loved it and listened to it a lot. I’d been producing The Fall at the time and I was very friendly with a guy called Simon Rogers, who was a really good musician and he had a sampler. With hip-hop, they tended to have the samples and sing over the samples to come up with something, but I wondered if you could use the samples in your songs, and if it would be possible to craft a song while using samples. I don’t know if anyone had actually done that yet - it was mainly people singing over samples, but not making the samples fit in their tunes - so on the next album Sense that’s what I tried to do. It worked out quite well on the tracks like “Sense” and “The Life of Riley” but it was quite hard on the others. Then I honed it down and got better at it and I did Jollification, which is pretty much all recorded like that, with bits of samples. Jollification isn’t really a band, but a record constructed in a similar way to how De La Soul might have constructed 3 Feet High and Rising but using songs and not singing along over the record. That album really shone a light on how to make a more vibey and serendipitous record than if I just sat there with a computer."

"What don't I say about Aja? We all have our different experiences with Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, but everything that they've created throughout the years is really awesome. I have a few albums of theirs I love; Can't Buy A Thrill, Katy Lied, Pretzel Logic, but there's a number of reasons why I am totally in love with Aja. It stems from the personnel, the feel, and how much it was a stab in another direction of pop culture. It was anti-pop, it was a bit on the outskirts of everything, I think. It's always funny listening to Donald Fagen singing about stuff because it's like, 'what's the guy rambling on about?' sometimes. A couple of my favourite musicians are on it; like Steve Gadd and, again, Michael McDonald. When I realised this was Michael McDonald singing background I lost my fucking mind, like, straight up. I always loved the Doobie Brothers and I knew his hits because of hip hop and stuff, but I remember being like 'Who's this magical person singing these dissonant chords behind the changes with ease with this weird timbre of voice?' – and you look at the credits and of course it's Michael McDonald. Aja, if I can't listen to it in its entirety then I get mad; I get pissed because I want to go through the whole album every time. One of my favourite moments on the album is Steve Gadd playing out on actual song 'Aja'; the way that just like the drum feels and everything – I don't know how to play drums but I love to try to act like I play drums to that one moment when he takes a slight solo at the end. Steve Gadd was always one of my favourite drummers ever because of the choices of records and stuff that he would do. Aja is he was he was one of those moments that it spanned out to everybody at that point. It was like at the height of their popularity. That was what happened and it was perfect."