"Again, with Blur it was hard to pick just one. I really love how this song starts, I like that guitar part, the scratching chuggy thing and then the way it explodes into this Beatles-y chorus. "I think Graham Coxon might be my favourite guitarist ever. It's that same thing: he's always offsetting Damon Albarn's beautiful melodies with really freaky, strange discordant guitar lines. I think they like different music, right? I remember Graham Coxon loved My Bloody Valentine, really droney guitar music like that and Damon Albarn is more poppy, and that combination together sounds so cool. You can always hear Graham under all Blur's songs, just making it all so much cooler. “I wasn't really caught up in the Britpop war, I grew up hearing it come through my older brother and sister's bedroom walls really. They used to play Blur and Oasis and Pulp, there was no distinction. There was no war going on in our house. We just loved all of it! “I feel bad but I haven't listened to Blur's most recent album. I need to listen to more new music but I'm pretty lazy about it. I love songs that I know and you know that feeling when you can sing along to a song that you love? You can't do that with new music or you have to get to know it first. It's just laziness! I always find listening to other people's music inspiring and I'm always like ""ooh I wanna write a song that's like this!"" And quite often that'll be a spark into something else entirely, but I don't wake up in the morning and put on an album in the way I imagine a lot of people do. I listen to music in the van a lot, that's where I listen to music the most. “I'll see new bands at festivals or Soph is really on top of new music. In the van it's normally Spotify, we have a playlist that we play all the time but there's no new music on it, its pure 80s’ and 90s’ sentimental classics. It's called FM FM! It was created and started by our wonderful ex-tour manager. We all love Magic FM, so it was meant to be the whole of their playlist made without adverts. It's so long that you could listen to it for days and not hear the same song twice."

"I think it's because when I was 12 I had Debut and I really liked that because I was just dancing around singing and enjoying it, quite an innocent record that had some beautiful moments. But really for me Post is an album I heard that was unlike any other at the time which was combining electronic and organic elements and I just really enjoyed delving into that sonic universe that she created, it's so experimental and forward-thinking and unique to her, but it perfectly fit into that time and landscape. I think it's really timeless. I think she has become a certain thing now but on those first four or five albums, for me, she was such a pioneer and so fiercely dedicated to her art and so unique and so closely linked to themes of nature and passion and love and the body and raw childlike feelings, and using all these really exciting instruments and sounds to put across her pop songs. 'Army Of Me' was the first single that came out - [sings intro] - POW! Clanging, massive drums and Michel Gondry was making the videos and I think the album just sonically draws in so many amazing, London early to mid nineties influences. But then having songs like 'Cover Me'. I remember hearing an alternately recorded version of 'Cover Me' which she actually did in a bat cave! You can hear the bats squealing and flitting about, so there's all these kind of sub-bass, deep 808 beat noises that I got really excited about, but she's got like bloody harpsichords and harps and stuff like really archaic chamber music sounds mixed with really heavily electronic digital sounds. So that was a real education, combining those things, because for me, if it's too much of one or the other I miss them a bit. Even on Berlin there's a lot of real instruments but there's synths and stuff going on too - I love it when people combine those things. Also, the eclecticness of the record: she's not afraid to travel from songs like 'I Miss You' which is that type of fanfare to 'Army Of Me' which is dark and techno and 'Hyperballad', which is like fucking four-to-the-floor, but just with all these strings it's super-emotive, a Technicolor dream."

"Someone told me that the middle of the road is the only place you definitely get run over, and this is very obvious, housewife soul… you can’t say that any more, can you? But I just like how it’s created. I get really into the fact that the band used to just bang out these songs, they’d put down these drum tracks then Al Green would just come in at the last minute and sing on top of it all. They’re so patterned, cyclical, and he just it off. It’s a load of faux, pre-religious romantic nonsense, but really well done. They were kind of cynical, I reckon. ‘Let’s knock a few of these out in a day and we’re on!’ They’re kind of simple songs when you look back at it, there’s a lack of depth to Al Green, but he’s got such a good voice, and such a good drummer. And age has made it sound cooler, but the core isn’t cool at all."

"My Mum played me Janis Joplin for the first time one night when I was 14 or 15 and I was just ‘This is a woman?! Oh my god! What?! I didn’t know that a woman could sound like this!’ That was quite life changing and it totally changed my perception of what you had to be as a female singer. It was such a breath of fresh air, because I’d listened to so much pop and this was my first experience of a woman singing in a completely different way. It broke boundaries for me and it opened different doors, because I was suddenly ‘Oh, you don’t have to just be this one thing.’ “I guess that ‘Mercedes Benz’ was more of a ditty and it wasn’t the perfectly constructed song. I think it’s just really playful; music is really playful and singing can just be funny and downplayed, but this song is also raw, it’s so fucking raw and gritty."

"Two Days One Night, it’s perfectly directed. The way the Dardenne brothers frame her, making her kids’ bed before she goes and tries to overdose in the bathroom — it stays in that one shot. It’s this wide shot, handheld, which nobody does like the Dardenne brothers. I’ve tried to chase it; there’s nothing like it. There’s nothing like watching a scene unfold and becoming something you did not expect in the beginning of the shot. It’s like one shot can tell an entire three-course meal. Also, that movie is one of the few movies that made me uncontrollably sob at the end, because of her power, the sweetness of it. I can’t believe the sweetness; it made me so raw and vulnerable. It’s not just that it’s tragic. It’s such a small story, but I connect with it. I connect with needing people and needing for them to hear from you. I feel like getting heard at the end of the movie, or not getting heard, depending on how you look at it, is so unbelievably moving. Marion Cotillard is the god of our generation. Not a goddess, she’s god!"

"I’m as influenced by contemporary filmmakers as I am by past filmmakers, so for me it was important to put two of them on here. The two films that my crew, my cinematographer, and I talk about when we’re going out to shoot are The Secret of the Grain and Fish Tank. They’re reference points for us. The lived-in intimacy of The Secret of the Grain and those two dinner sequences! The story is great, it’s fun, it’s engaging, but those dinner scenes are moments that have touched me very much. I felt, for the first time, that I was truly living with people I didn’t know. The film has these ongoing dialogue scenes that just feel so natural, even though they’re constructed, and those kinds of scenes set the bar for what cinema can do. Fish Tank I love because I love Andrea Arnold, and I can relate to this young protagonist who isn’t so goal-oriented. It’s not like she’s got a mission. She’s just trying to grow up, and she’s as confused about her life situation as anyone else. And it leads her to make some bad decisions, but ultimately we really like her because we know what she’s going through. She’s never presented as someone who we need to decide whether or not she’s likable. There’s an ambiguity to her presentation—you’re just letting her be herself. To me, it’s one of the great examples in modern cinema where a director casts someone and lets the person take over the role, as opposed to tailoring the person to the role as written. I think the movie benefits from that, and everyone around her just falls into her world. Michael Fassbender—you’ve never seen him like that, not because he’s better than he’s ever been, but because he’s forced to deal with the energy of this girl who’s just being herself. So this is just one of those movies I have to keep showing to people who haven’t seen it and have to keep watching to remember that representation of that girl, which is as good as anything I’ve seen in modern cinema."

"I’m as influenced by contemporary filmmakers as I am by past filmmakers, so for me it was important to put two of them on here. The two films that my crew, my cinematographer, and I talk about when we’re going out to shoot are The Secret of the Grain and Fish Tank. They’re reference points for us. The lived-in intimacy of The Secret of the Grain and those two dinner sequences! The story is great, it’s fun, it’s engaging, but those dinner scenes are moments that have touched me very much. I felt, for the first time, that I was truly living with people I didn’t know. The film has these ongoing dialogue scenes that just feel so natural, even though they’re constructed, and those kinds of scenes set the bar for what cinema can do. Fish Tank I love because I love Andrea Arnold, and I can relate to this young protagonist who isn’t so goal-oriented. It’s not like she’s got a mission. She’s just trying to grow up, and she’s as confused about her life situation as anyone else. And it leads her to make some bad decisions, but ultimately we really like her because we know what she’s going through. She’s never presented as someone who we need to decide whether or not she’s likable. There’s an ambiguity to her presentation—you’re just letting her be herself. To me, it’s one of the great examples in modern cinema where a director casts someone and lets the person take over the role, as opposed to tailoring the person to the role as written. I think the movie benefits from that, and everyone around her just falls into her world. Michael Fassbender—you’ve never seen him like that, not because he’s better than he’s ever been, but because he’s forced to deal with the energy of this girl who’s just being herself. So this is just one of those movies I have to keep showing to people who haven’t seen it and have to keep watching to remember that representation of that girl, which is as good as anything I’ve seen in modern cinema."