"I originally just dipped my toe in the water with John Coltrane. The first one I got was one of his 50s albums. My friend worked in Virgin Records in Manchester when they were a small independent mail order-type shop – it wasn't the Mega Store at that point – and they had a bit of a jazz section and occasionally they lost the covers to records, and he gave me one of his records. It was quite straight jazz, but I wasn't ready for straight jazz and so it lurked around in my record collection. Then I went for A Love Supreme, but that was too over my head at that point; it took me a while to get into that. But then I got Selflessness second-hand, and it has 'My Favourite Things' on it; it's a real out-there version of it, not the version that was the radio hit. It was recorded live and it's a record that squeezes emotion out of you and leaves you rinsed. It makes you breathe differently! It's the most engaging journey as a piece of music; it's really profound to me. It's still a record that I return to whenever I need a good head clean. It really will wash my brain out."

"""I bought the first Buzzcocks album on the day it came out. I still have it in its plastic carrier bag. I knew it was going to be good as the Buzzcocks were already great. There was an excitement about being a youngster and liking the Buzzcocks at that time. Again, they were from my town and it was unheard of at that time for a band from Manchester to get the kind of commercial attention the Buzzcocks were attracting. They were on Top Of The Pops and were influencing other bands from around the country. And they sounded like they were from Manchester too. They were clever lyrically and clever musically. Buzzcocks made modern guitar music that was appropriately punky but sounded razor-sharp on the radio in the middle of such a load of mainstream nonsense, which was a great source of pride for many Mancunians. That, coupled with the aesthetic of the band and the way they did their sleeve artwork and the way they dressed, was a very potent combination. Buzzcocks influenced The Smiths massively in the way we approached our record sleeves and our choice of independent record company - because of the Buzzcocks we took on a Mancunian DIY ethic, whilst being in the charts."""

"You know, I really get into… I can just throw it out there, because it was a great… it really was really good, but Shut Up, Little Man. It’s a documentary. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s about these two guys that move into an apartment in San Francisco. And their next-door neighbors are the worst neighbors you can possibly imagine. It’s these two older gay gentlemen that have the worst relationship that anyone could ever have. And they spend all hours of the day just screaming at each other. And so these two guys started recording these arguments. I remember in the 1990s, back before the Internet, if you wanted these odd, like, socially passed-around… Remember like Faces of Death? You could get a VHS copy of it? And so this was… You could go to certain independent record stores and they’d have a small collection of these bootlegged cassette tapes of their arguments. And I remember when we were doing Empire Records was the first time I heard these. And it’s the story of the guys that recorded… They track down the two guys that recorded all these things that were passed around through our generation. It’s a pretty amazing documentary. It’s pretty good."