"A late-night friend right up there with Cosmos and Hearts of Space. I’m sure I wouldn’t like this series as much without the Matt Dillon segment (episode three). The camaraderie in the other pieces is great, but the tension of that segment is built in real-time improvisation. The story unfolds right before you—one of the coolest, most magical feelings you can get. I still get really uncomfortable at the fish/trousers part in the Tom Waits episode, though."

"I grew up with this album, and I remember being really sensitive to the different musical styles. It's quite a New York album, as well—all the different styles melting into one city. This is a really witty album. There's a true masterpiece in it, "Real Men," which was queer before it was a huge subject of conversation, quite gender-bending—questioning this idea of being a man and what that means. Musically, it's really rich, and very frilly as well: lots of long songs with improvisation. It's an interesting and empowering album."

"I’m a huge Mike Leigh fan and would love to work with him. His approach to filming sounds fascinating and exciting. I understand that he doesn’t give his actors a script but instead hands them scenes and encourages improvisation. I’m not sure if this is indeed his process, but the result is nothing short of beautiful intimate moments. And this film is full of them! At times it feels so intimate it’s almost voyeuristic. To me, that’s what makes a performance really exciting…when you’re almost embarrassed to be peeking into peoples’ lives. And that happens a lot in this perfect emotional drama."

"This is another record that has taken up my time over the past decade or so and I think this is her best album. I can't wait for the next one. She's been brilliant in forging her own path and it's really exciting. She played with us on the Neon Neon stuff but she was releasing records, mostly in the Welsh language, for a few years before then. I think she's on a really interesting musical journey. She is an amazing songwriter, a very natural songwriter who could write anything. She was in LA but she's been in the Lake District for a couple of years now. With this record in particular, there are some incredibly profound songs and she makes experimentation and improvisation extremely palatable to the ears which is very hard to do. Just to be able to make really unique pop music is also incredibly hard to do!"

"I don’t mean this in a derogatory way, but Graham Oliver and Steve Dawson of Saxon were into the bluesy bands - simple but with a lot of groove. But me and Paul Quinn were into more muso bands like Genesis and King Crimson. That was the type of stuff we played, with more jamming and improvisation. As a bass player and singer, my goal was to play like Chris Squire. I used to try and learn the songs – it took me about six months to learn ‘Roundabout’. I‘ve talked to Rick Wakeman about Yes, and he said Jon Anderson would structure melodies like I do it. They would sit in a room and arrange things around the vocals, and we do that because it gives me more freedom to write. I could listen to this all day. NWOBHM bands liked Yes because the musicianship was great - it moves away from blues feel to a jazz feel. A lot of these guys were university trained, but we learned from listening to music. We knew nothing about music theory or scales, but prog rock really made you better as musicians when you learned to play it. It seemed unattainable because it was so good."

"If I could pick a song that I could go back in time and write, this is it. I think it's a perfect composition from start to finish, the melody to the drum groove, it’s really hard man. I think if I was to play that drum groove on its own a lot of people would think how does this fit into anything? And the fact this man's made this love song, that can be played in soundsystems, you can listen to it at home, it's so like transferable and I just love that about it. There's no right or wrong place to play it. I could play this at my wedding, I could play this if I’m going through a break up and I’m at home on my own, I could play this at a gig. I mean, for me it’s just a perfect song. And I think for the album, I was more concerned with writing songs than I was creating music for improvisation. I can do that, it wasn’t about trying to prove that, I want you to listen to this from start to finish, everything should be a great song. That was a good three and a half minutes. I was trying to get that with a lot of the tracks where it just takes you on this journey and that's a great example."

"I find that many albums by The Beatles don't completely hold together for me. While Sgt. Pepper's… holds together stylistically, it isn't one of my favourite albums. However, I have to include The Beatles, because they are clearly the greatest band that ever stalked the earth. I got into the Love album to introduce my son to The Beatles. George Martin lovingly remastered it and I think he has made some improvements. Sonically it is fantastic. It flows. I love being able to go across their entire span of history. I went to the Love Cirque De Soleil show in Las Vegas, which was a bad idea, but this record is a fantastic introduction and became my son's understanding of The Beatles. The other records are well worth investigating, of course, and they made truly great records, but there aren't any that could go in my Baker's Dozen. The album contains 'A Day In The Life', which is in my top five greatest songs. I love the fact it was created through such a mad, collaborative technique. One part is John, one part is Paul and they left a minute-and-a-half to fill with something. What fucking amazing, arrogant craziness could do that? And, to then produce one of the greatest songs. That song is akin to how James write to a degree. We write through improvisation. No one takes anything into a room. We start improvising and the improvisation may take ten minutes or it may take 90 minutes. We record it all and then whoever wants to can take a track, chop it up in whatever way they want to, and then present it back to the band. Someone else can then input and add a keyboard line or whatever. Therefore, we have this collaborative process that you can hear on the new album that is a little insane, as we might have had a part, which worked in the first ten minutes, and then we might try and weld it to something that worked hours later. They don't necessarily join and we have to find a way of joining them. That acceptance of chance can lead to the best moments. Most bands have one or two songwriters (we now have four) and they are at the mercy of their conscious ability. With us, a chaotic reaction to each other is creating the song, which is probably why we have been around for 33 years and we never get bored. We never know what the fuck we are going to do next. The Beatles had that on their greatest collaborative songs, where they couldn't be sure quite where a song was going. They allowed themselves the possibility of fucking songs up in a great way. The Beatles are the Shakespeare of our time. They will still be played in 100 years' time and people will still wonder how the fuck they made such amazing music."