"There's so much of his stuff I could have chosen. The reason I chose this one is, this was the first time I heard this band. I remember sitting in the car with my friend and saying "my mate's given me this tape, let's check it out". And I put it on and we both just looked at each other and went, "Oh my God!". I'll never forget it. It was a day like today, really sunny, and this giant doorway that you didn't know was there opened up, introducing you to this whole new world. It still feels like that now. He's another one where the colours never fade. The thing about the two as well, Coltrane and Miles Davis, is that they both represent two parts of myself. I always think of Coltrane as being outdoors music. Organic, countryside music. Elvin Jones [drummer in John Coltrane quartet], just sounds like waves crashing against the shore, the wind blowing in the trees. The music feels like this stormy day and then Miles Davis feels really urban, like city lights. When I was discovering this whole Coltrane thing, there were quite a few years where that was my religion. When I was learning the saxophone, I was studying a lot, practising 12 hours a day, and listening to Coltrane all the time and I was doing a lot of meditation as well. I was really involved with Tibetan Buddhism, doing retreats and doing a lot of study. I was very into it for quite a number of years. I've come out of that feeling like these pentatonics, these Nubian rhythms, these ancient rhythms, they make a lot of sense of the universe."

"This was a bit of a dodgy situation at the time but I didn’t know that. Tom had asked me to work with him and it was a solo record and that was all I knew. It wasn’t with the group. He used Mike [Campbell, Heartbreakers lead guitarist] for guitar and it was Mike’s studio that we recorded in, in his garage in LA. Tom just stopped me in the street one day in Beverley Hills somewhere and he said, ""I’ve just been listening to George Harrison’s new album. I love it. I’m having a barbecue. Do you wanna come?"" I couldn’t go so he said, ""do you fancy writing some songs together and see what we come up with?"" and I said, ""yeah, I’d love to!"" So I went round his house the next day and after we wrote one, we then wrote, believe it or not, ‘Freefalling’ which was such a big hit for him. So it worked out great and we carried on doing them in Mike’s garage, which was an amazingly sparse studio. It was a garage full of motorbikes and oil cans and bedsteads and things like that - it was pretty amazing! Where him and George looking for that panoramic ELO sound? Well, it wasn’t always that panoramic a sound. I was gradually quietening that sound down that ELO had done and there were less strings. In ELO, it used to be a case of, ""oooh! String day tomorrow!"" and then by about the tenth album it became [adopts dismayed voice] ""oh, fucking hell! It’s string day tomorrow."" I’d had enough of them. I grew tired of the strings. But that’s not why they asked me. It was more the punch I was doing later on and they just liked the sound that I made, whatever it was. They liked something about it."

"I think these albums [by Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke] essentially let me know what I was supposed to do in life. I would read Jaco's autobiography, I wanted to learn everything about the man, and I would go find the other albums that he worked on. Everybody knows him as the actual virtuoso bassist that planted the seed, but I wanted to know what made him tick, what got him to the point of being who he was. That's what Jaco Pastorius did to me; it made me want to know him as a person. I would study, I would transcribe, I'd listen, imitate and mimic everything. As you go through different phases, somebody may even go so far as to say 'you sound like this person'. I mean, you gotta be okay with those moments, because it's leading to something. If you're keen on the instrument, it's always leading to something else. Every time I listen to the self-titled album I feel weightless. I feel like it's going between 10-year-old me and 35-year-old me. It almost feels like I've never heard it before, and I get the same emotions every time I hear it. It's one of the only ways I know I'm moving forward is by hearing this album all the time. It's crazy, it feels weird, but it's the truth. It's like a reset button in my life, listening to this album. By the time I get to the end of Jaco's album, I just remember how much and how hard guys like him used to work. It also reminds me to keep going, and it also reminds me where I came from."

"I think one of the main reasons I picked Abattoir Blues and Lyre Of Orpheus was because, as a double album, you get more bang for your buck. Abattoir Blues has a more gospel feel to it, background vocals and big crescendos. Lyre Of Orpheus was generally a quieter record except for the title track, which is one of my favourites. I love the lyrics to that song. One awesome thing about Nick Cave is the darkness and the humour in his stuff. On Abattoir Blues, I love 'There She Goes, My Beautiful World', 'Hiding All Away' and 'Nature Boy'. Just good tunes man. At this point you can hear the Warren Ellis influence. I've always been a Nick Cave fan, since The Birthday Party. My roommate at the time, Charles Peterson [Sub Pop photographer], had a copy of Prayers On Fire and I've been listening to and following Nick Cave ever since then. First time I got to see him he didn't play Seattle, so me and my friends drove three hours north to Vancouver and that was on the First Born Is Dead tour. My favourite ever Nick Cave lyric was going way back to 'Deep In The Woods' [from Mutiny/The Bad Seed] - where it ends with the line, "Tonight we sleep in separate ditches"; that always cracks me up. 20,000 Days On Earth was the best music documentary I've ever seen. It didn't follow the normal " and then he did this and then he did that" of those Behind The Music narratives, it was a surreal and cool peak in to Cave's world. Something I learned about him that I didn't know already is that he likes to eat pizza in front of the TV!"