"So I'm mentioning New York nightlife. I'd been born in New York, but I'd been brought up in the suburbs, and I loved New York, I was obsessed with everything pertaining to the New York art scene, the New York music scene, and I would hide in the bathroom in the train that went in and out of New York from my town, so I wouldn't have to buy a ticket. I would go into New York and walk around and look at record stores, clothing stores and nightclubs, so I was exposed to a lot of music that I wouldn't otherwise have been exposed to, like early hip hop. Hip hop, up until Eric B & Rakim, had been very drum machine based, drum machines with synth basslines. Then they rolled up with this song called 'Eric B Is President' which was sample-based. The first time I remember thinking, 'wow this sounds so different from all those other hip hop songs'. Rakim I think is still the most powerful MC of all time. Paid In Full I think is still really the first cohesive hip hop album. It helps that it has four or five huge New York hit singles on it. Paid In Full came out, and Public Enemy's Nation Of Millions came out, and suddenly people realised that hip hop could be a genre that worked on albums and not just tracks. At the time, it was impossible to go out in New York and not hear this record. Every car that drove by, ever nightclub, restaurant, shop, something off Paid In Full was playing at every second of every hour of every day. That and Public Enemy, you just couldn't get away from these records, and it helped that they were amazing records, not ubiquitous and terrible."

"I love Brian Eno, but I picked this album specifically because it's one of those albums that if you're up at six in the morning, stressed out wondering why you were up all night, I can just put this on and everything feels OK. It's almost superficial because it's so sweet and ambient, but I respect it a lot because it always piques my interest. I know he wrote some of the songs with Robert Wyatt from Soft Machine, and Robert Wyatt has this delicate, fragile sort of energy, I feel like that's there. An old friend of mine, Yuka Honda from Cibo Matto, the first band I was in, first played this to me on vinyl in the mid-90s. I was smoking a lot of pot in those days. I've read that Eno made it with the intention of actually playing it in airports. For fun I have put it on [in an airport] and there is something quite airporty about it… something machine-like about the melody. It reminds me of the architecture of an airport, it's not bustling or busy, it's like an airport when no one's there. I think it's the number one album I'd recommend for taking a bath to."

"I love the sound of ‘I Can’t Explain’. It’s my favourite and I love all those earlier ones. I used do them onstage with a group called The Nightriders and The Idle Race as well. ‘Pictures Of Lily’ and that kind of stuff. I used to love playing all those Who songs. They had something about them, The Who. It was like magic, the sound. And just watching Pete Townshend, he was always amazing. Did I ever catch them back in the day? Yeah! Not half! The loudest bloody thing I’ve ever heard in my life! I went to this place called Midnight City in Birmingham and it was quite a big room and everyone was waiting for them: ""wow! We’re gonna see The Who!"" and they struck up and went BLAAANG! and your earholes would go WOOOOM! and you couldn’t hear a fucking thing! Your hearing was gone! You know when your ears go inside out? And it’s like silence and you can’t hear fuck all for the next 10 minutes until your hearing starts coming back! And gradually you could start hearing them again. It was like a compressor, almost. It was really exciting to hear that when you’re a kid. And the tunes they played were so great. It was beautiful. Fantastic!"