"It’s early 70s, with the Master Musicians of Joujouka. That’s partly why I chose it, because they’re on a couple of tracks. That record is one of the earliest jazz records I found myself listening to a lot. Somebody handed it to me and I was really impressed by it. I didn’t know anything about these Joujouka guys at that point except for the fact that their name always came up in relationship to the Rolling Stones and Brian Jones. At that point I don’t think I’d even heard of that Pipes of Pan At Jajouka record that Brian Jones recorded but I started to get really interested into Dancing In Your Head. Ornette went to Morocco with this music critic named Robert Palmer. Palmer was a really important music writer and I’d read some of his stuff, so when I saw his name on the back of that record I was even further intrigued. It was a kind of an early avenue into free jazz for me, because this record led me to Miles and to Coltrane and to Thelonious Monk and Albert Ayler and all this other stuff. I think probably at the same time I was also listening to African “world music” as they called it later, and a lot of Gamelan was really important to me. I was looking for world music that I felt I could find stuff in, that could inform my interest in rock & roll and certainly the Gamelan music had a lot of that just because it was metallic and loud and it had these furious beats and Dancing In Your Head did too because it was really drone-y in ways that reminded me of the Velvet Underground and was also really loud. It also tied directly with jazz music because The Master Musicians of Jajouka playing those rhaitas were circular breathing in the way the jazz players were, just going around, you never felt like the music broke for breath. They were just going around in this endless loop, which also tied it in with my interest in tape music and tape loops and things like that. It wasn’t really until I went there and played with these guys in the 90s – we went to the village and spent a couple of days there and kind of played all night long with them – they had a cheap generator and an electric guitar – I could see that it was loud and kind of stomping in a way that related to rock & roll but it also had this circular trance-y thing where you started to lose track of time. Had it been going on for ten minutes or forty minutes or whatever it was? It had a very druggy quality with or without the drugs. There was just something about Ornette Coleman and when I heard this record I felt like I was hearing someone who was a great force. He did all these amazing ground breaking records and it opened up the whole world of jazz for me."

"When I was about ten, I was given The Compact King Crimson on cassette tape and that’s what led me to “21st Century Schizoid Man.” This song is from In the Court of the Crimson King, which has the screaming face on the cover, and the face is inspired by the Arthur Janov book The Primal Scream. Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis. “My Dad told me that at the time of the book and album there was a real fad for going out into nature and screaming guttural sounds. It became this zeitgeist self-help technique and I believe that’s what influenced the book, but essentially, it’s a guy having an existential meltdown and the song taps into that. “I think because I was young when I heard it, I didn’t appreciate this more complex meaning, and at the time I just appreciated the sheer aggression of the music. It was also the first time I’d ever heard those complicated time signatures and polyrhythms, as well as the combination of distorted guitar and saxophone. ""I hadn’t grown up on jazz, so I sort of thought it was for nerds, but when I heard this and heard the sax on the time signatures I was like ‘This is like jazz rock’. In the Court of the Crimson King is hailed by lots of people - like Shellac - as the first Math Rock or Post Rock record. They also invented heavy metal if you think about it, because they were doing riffs before Black Sabbath. “Our first album, Making Dens, is heavily indebted to King Crimson. We very much wore our influences on our sleeve in the beginning, and we had this approach of throwing everything including the kitchen sink at our songwriting. Whenever I listen to Making Dens, I hear the chaos of a band trying to sound like King Crimson. They’ve been a big influence for Mystery Jets."

"I came to this record through the Encyclopaedia Of Jazz. As a teenager I played a lot of jazz piano, but more like learning how to play bop or more traditional types of jazz. And I was getting to the point where I was starting to find out about Sun Ra and some of the weirder stuff that was out there, and I was working through the encyclopaedia and I crossed every record off the list if I thought it would be far out and interesting. We had a scam going at the time. HMV in Toronto was pretty relaxed and you could return things for cash value immediately. So I'd go in and buy a stack of ten CDs and I'd just got a CD burner - this was like 1997 - so I'd take them home and burn them all and then take them straight back. And they'd be like, ""You've got the entire recorded work of The Beatles here - you didn't find anything that you liked on there?"" And I'd be like, ""No these are all rubbish, sorry."" And I did the same with John Coltrane. Then I can remember getting to the Albert Ayler page of the encyclopaedia and you know how there's that snooty canonisation thing with jazz music where somebody like Wynton Marsalis or one of those conservative types would be like, ""This guy lost the plot. He went off the deep end."" But this record blew me away. I got this and Interstellar Space, the John Coltrane album, and they both have long periods of free-form wildness on them. But the thing I loved about Albert Ayler is the melodies on the songs - again, a lot of them sound the same, but they feel so elemental to me. It's another record where I feel like those melodies have been there since the beginning of time and it just took him to play them. The sound of his saxophone is so amazing. It's super far-out and forward-looking. If that's too out there for you, there's this album by him called New Grass, where he hired a rock band, and it's like some A&R man had tried to make him have a hit record. There's a song on it called 'Heart Love' - it's less far-out but it has his crazy saxophone playing on it, but with a beautiful melody and this free-soul singing on it."

"For me this is possibly the greatest rock album of all time. It's a band playing at the absolute, height of their power. It's very ambitious: it's got elements of ska and funk, pop songs, soul, jazz, rockabilly, reggae - and in the end it's got this really great blues energetic vibe. It just seems like they tossed it off and lyrically it touches on a lot of different subjects. Some of the songs are very political: 'Spanish Bombs' is about the Spanish civil war, 'London Calling' itself - that song is such an anthem. The band had some commercial success after this album - with Combat Rock - but to me London Calling is the pinnacle of their song-writing. It is just a fantastic record with an iconic sleeve; that shot of Paul Simonon smashing his bass, it's just incredible. I saw The Clash play in Chicago when I was on tour and it was like electricity. They came out and they started with 'London Calling'. The place was rammed with 5,000+ people and it went OFF! It was as if a bomb dropped and it was one of the most exciting concerts I've ever seen!"