""Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. I actually just started reading it - I'm telling you a good book to read I haven't finished people! Jay Z actually recommended that I read it - it gives you a lot of life lessons. In any business there are certain principles that would work in every walk of life and will help you.""

"I remember when I first heard Fear Of A Black Planet it was, again, one of those moments when you thought ‘this is something’. It was still at the relatively early stages of rap, but Chuck D was really onto something. The sound of the tracks – the rhythm units they were using with those tiny percussion sounds – was unlike anything I’d heard. That’s why I chose it. Jay-Z has made some great records, as has Dr. Dre but Fear Of A Black Planet changed things. We covered ‘911 Is A Joke’, which we got an enormous amount of flak for. Middle class white boys covering Public Enemy – what were they thinking? I can tell you the irony wasn’t lost on us. In fact, Flavor Flav loved our version, which was a huge thrill. Public Enemy were pioneers who went out on a limb and started something which has become the biggest paradigm shift in music that we have had in the last 25 years. You look at some of those songs and think about how many samples they contain – the list is enormous. But that sampling technology is something we’ve all used since. Public Enemy were inventors, as were others with the albums I’ve chosen. They moved music to a new place and that’s what turns me on."

"When I was a teenager, I was an avid Smash Hits reader - all through the 80s, that's what I read. So when the Beastie Boys and Run DMC came along, I was all over it. We were nicking VW signs from cars, skateboarding. That was a really big thing for ages. I was into that stuff for a while but the one hip hop album I listened to the most was this one. It's another one that doesn't ever fade. It's got this depth to it, and it's easy. But it's also serious and it's bumping. Obviously there are loads of other really important hip hop albums for me: Notorious B.I.G, Dr Dre, Jay-Z. I get a similar feeling from listening to really good hip hop that I get listening to Nubian music. The whole way of writing with loops really appeals to me. It was weird because I was listening to a lot of this kind of music, and playing and listening to a lot of jazz but they were two separate worlds. I was really into guitar music as well. When I was a kid I was really into Van Halen, heavy metal and all that stuff. Those two worlds never quite joined together. It wasn't until A Tribe Called Quest, and Galliano, Joyful Noise of the Creator. That Tribe Called Quest album, for me, joined those worlds. They mined a lot of old Lou Donaldson records, and other things, but it sounded really current as well. It pulled a lot of things together. And obviously, it branched out to lots of classic 90s hip hop: Guru, Jazzmatazz, Nas. It was a really amazing time."

"There’s so many Beatles songs that I could have chosen, my entire list could have been made from them and they’ve all meant quite a lot to me. I picked “In My Life” because everyone relates to that one in a way, everyone has experienced that feeling of when they go back to their hometown and the little odd things that spark off a memory. “I think it was John who wrote this one and he was quite young when he wrote it. I grew up in a place called Menlove Gardens and he grew up on Menlove Avenue, so I felt the connection. I was born in Penny Lane in 1958, so it was the ‘60s when I was growing up and a lot of the landmarks were the same. I remember reading a magazine that had a page of the original lyrics, and it was talking about getting the 72 bus at Penny Lane into town. I recognised all of the roads and it was very close to home for me. Even if I hadn’t recognised all of that though, I still think that this song has the power to do that. “It does bring me back, to places that I’ll remember all my life. I go back to Liverpool now and a lot of places have changed. The town is great and always very vibrant, but there’s a park called Calderstones Park and it’s very beautiful and very green and places like Princes Avenue and Menlove, they’re all full of trees and very green and quite lovely really, which people often don’t associate with Liverpool. My memories are mixed with these beautiful parks, greenery and trees, but at the same time the city centre was quite stark, but very vibrant in the ‘60s, it was a bustling city. “I think if you live on planet earth then The Beatles are an influence, even if you don’t know it. Even if you’re Jay Z, The Beatles are an influence. The Beatles, Bob Dylan and a couple of other people changed music into an art form, rather than a commodity. At a certain point in the ‘60s, all of a sudden you had people making artistically fantastic records, breaking the boundaries technologically and emotionally. It turned into something else and although it feels like it’s turning back into what it was right now, I feel like The Beatles and Bob Dylan were responsible for that change"