"Tony Williams was Miles Davis' drummer throughout the 60s and he was really young; he was only 17 when he started playing with Miles. As he entered his 20s, flower power and Jimi Hendrix was all kicking off and he wanted to get more amplified. He wanted to sing as well, which was a problem within The Tony Williams Lifetime, as he wasn't a great singer; he used to sing a quarter-tone flat. He's also the reason John McLaughlin moved to America. Tony heard him on some tape and invited him over, and he introduced him to Miles Davis. And the other member of The Tony Williams Lifetime was this amazing organist called Larry Young. He later had these funk hits like 'Turn Off The Lights' and he's probably more famous for that kind of thing, but he originally started off on Blue Note as this Jimmy Smith-type organist. His style comes from John Coltrane and in actual fact he used to practice with Coltrane. He had a real modernist approach to the organ. The thing about this band is that they did turn it up to 11. They really did over-amplify and distort things. There are no decent recordings of The Tony Williams Lifetime because it's all so overblown. It feels like it's on fire and it's so intense. The drumming is insane and the organ is about texture. This is a record that I've never got fed up with."

"This well known 1968 album is a pun on the fantastic expedition of Lewis and Clark, the famous leaders of the USA's 'Corps of Discovery' who were the first east coast Americans to successfully negotiate the north west passage to the Pacific Ocean in the early 19th century. Of course this ties in beautifully to the John Evans story featured in American Interior - Lewis and Clark used the maps he created between 1795-7 (whilst searching for a mythical tribe of Welsh speaking First Nation Americans) for the first year of their expedition. There's a keen sense of the rhythm of exploration on this fantastic record. Dillard's peerless banjo picking could easily power a steam boat up the Missouri River and Clark's melancholic musings on songs like 'Train Leaves Here This Morning' give a clear sense of long distance travel and loss. Meanwhile a team of proto Country Rock greats including Bernie Leadon, Sneaky Pete and Chris Hillman play away busily in the background, setting the benchmark for the mellow mountain sound that would dominate the airwaves the world over in the following years."

"That was from John Peel, where I discovered load of music when I was younger. It was a free album given away with their first album. I remember John Peel didn't really play the proper album, he just played the dub version. I had taped most of the tracks off the radio but I didn't have a copy, and ended up finding it at a market about ten years ago. To me that's like Thatcher Music - it came out about the time that Thatcher came to power and in some ways you can hear that, it's got this cold harshness, like its anticipating the shit that's going to go down, especially the track called 'Paranoia Claustrophobia', it's great but it's pretty dark. I got told off for playing that. In the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher dying you weren't supposed to mention her. I was doing the show at the time, I thought it was a big event and didn't really like the fact that we weren't allowed to mention it. Tony Benn had died a few months earlier and as soon as that happened everyone was going 'loony left' and stuff like that, nobody seemed to take much care about whether they were going to upset his family, but as soon as Margaret Thatcher died it was 'oh don't speak ill of her, have some respect'. So you weren't allowed to play records that referenced her and you weren't supposed to mention her, but I played that Basement Five and said something like 'music from the Thatcher era' and ten minutes later somebody came down and said 'don't say things like that'. Tory governments are always going on about how the BBC is a hotbed of socialism but I got told off for that so I don't think there's much truth in it."