"Nineties hip-hop has never been bettered for me. I kind of lost interest in the eighties when electro started morphing into hip-hop. It got a bit clunky for me as it tried to sound more real, it sounded clumsier. By the time you get to the nineties, you had a mutation of what's real. The production on The Infamous – sonically it's just genius. It's a shame some of the lyrics are so offensive as it detracts from how good the music is. It's brilliant soundtrack music – it carries on the thread for me of the stomach knot for me, from John Carpenter. I don't know why they were so quick to move on from the sound of The Infamous. I suppose the royalties thing is huge in hip-hop, now everybody buys an off-the-shelf keyboard and has a stab at it to avoid having to clear samples. But it doesn't sound the same. It was hard to pick one. When I got ousted from The Verve in 1995, I stumbled on Tical by Method Man. That's definitely my favourite Wu-Tang record, probably because it was my first. The production doesn't bear any relation to anything I'd heard before. You could draw a parallel with Tom Waits – it's from another world really. That one needed perseverance as well. It sounds shit at first, but then it reveals itself."

"This was something of an anomaly in Faith No More’s catalogue, from a film made in the early ‘90s called Judgement Night. The soundtrack was a sort of experiment where they would get bands - white people, essentially - and they would couple them with hip-hop groups and see what happened. This was one of my first introductions to hip-hop to be honest and it wasn’t even ‘proper’ hip-hop, it was bands playing with rapping over the top. “I just thought it was absolutely amazing and I couldn’t get enough of it, this worn-out tape. ‘Another Body Murdered’ was one of the best tracks on it and it ended up introducing me to loads of bands and loads of rappers and this wasn’t like nu-metal, it was mostly edgy rappers. But then there was also a track ‘Fallin’ with Teenage Fanclub featuring De La Soul, things like that. It gave me a really broad introduction via a medium I already understood, which was bands. “But because it was a faceless tape, I didn’t really know who everyone was or who was doing what on each track. I didn’t realise then what cultural lines might have been crossed, because it was all just blurred into one: here’s the guitar, here’s somebody rapping. It didn’t matter to me at all and I think that was a healthy way to discover that sort of music."

"My third film I want to say is highly recommended — and I’m sure many people have seen all these films, but I’m gonna tell you why — is Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction was the first film to me that had a descrambling formula of storytelling, accompanied with the power of perfect dialogue. This moved me artistically. I remember watching this film for the first time in the movie theater, and seeing the character get killed, and then seeing the character come back… He was my favorite character, right? It was John Travolta; at the time, I’m a big John Travolta fan, and Sam Jackson was just breaking out on the scene, but I loved him in the movie as well. But to see the story go into its own twists and turns really resonated with me as an artist and kind of related to the way that hip hop tells our hip hop stories. That’s why I suggest that movie. It descrambled the formula of Hollywood storytelling."

"My friend Leila Arab turned me on to them. I love their songs, especially Full Moon (Death Classic) and Guillotine. Intense rapping, lyrics and lush beats. It's all good. They stand out because they're visceral, but also the global, fresh mix of a black English guy and a white Cali drummer and punk and hip-hop. Mostly I don't listen to experimental rap but in between there are gems, the same with all music genres."

"My friend Leila Arab turned me on to them. I love their songs, especially Full Moon (Death Classic) and Guillotine. Intense rapping, lyrics and lush beats. It's all good. They stand out because they're visceral, but also the global, fresh mix of a black English guy and a white Cali drummer and punk and hip-hop. Mostly I don't listen to experimental rap but in between there are gems, the same with all music genres."

"I had a group of friends who were all into rap, and we’d drive around and listen to jazzy, laid-back East Coast hip hop. If you didn’t go into New York it was boring, so we’d spend endless time driving in my friend’s car listening to Digable Planets, A Tribe Called Quest or De La Soul. I wrote an article for my high school newspaper about the hidden links between punk and rap."