"Do you remember the story Bill Withers tells on this record about 'Grandma's Hands'? When he was a kid, he was really close to his grandma. He talks about one of those churches she used to attend and this was a proper happy church where his grandma used to smack everything with a tambourine! Singing something that you really believe is incredible. Not everyone in a gospel choir has that faith – I don't have that faith in the way they do. I have faith in something – not sure what it is – but being around a few gospel choirs, there's a joy in it! And because of this belief. I did a couple of tunes with a choir on it – one of which was 'Cry For Help' in 1991. We recorded it in LA with what was the best gospel choir in the world at the time and hearing them sing the words made me believe them more even though I wrote the bloody words. But listening to Bill Withers talk about being a kid and going to those churches as a kid…[shakes head in disbelief] - he's a good storyteller and it's a great record. I find it a bit odd that if Bill Withers walked down any main street in the world, I would challenge anyone to recognise him. If you sang anyone of his songs to anybody from a group of teenagers up to a grandma, they would know it instantly. Can I hold a note as well as Bill Withers? No one can do that! It's physically impossible. He must have been drinking something very special at that time in his life. There's a bunch of songs that he wrote and he nailed a lot of emotion in those songs. 'Lean On Me' is often the first song people play on the piano when they start – it's all really gifted song writing, distilling things down to a simple thing. 
"

"When you inevitably are asked about your favourite record, you can scratch your head and go through a list, because your taste changes from year-to-year or through different periods of your life. However, I have always been able to say that Raw Power is my favourite from the moment I first heard it, and I don't think it has been equalled since. A couple of friends recommended it to me. At the age of 14, I was starting to play guitar in a certain way and the name [of Stooges' guitarist] James Williamson kept cropping up. A couple of guys I knew assumed I had been listening to Raw Power because of the way I was playing riffs. So I thought I had better investigate. I knew all about Iggy and The Stooges but I wasn't aware of Raw Power. I got the album in about 1976. I had heard so much about it that eventually I want into town to buy it and I picked up a copy for about three quid, which was all I had. The cover alone made me want to buy the record, and, when I heard it, I realised why my mates had been saying what they had. In particular, the song 'Gimme Danger' started off with a riff that was very much like one I was playing with the band I was in at the time. As a guitarist, James Williamson's playing struck me as having the technique of Jimmy Page but with the irreverence and attitude of Keith Richards. I have since become friends with James and have talked to him about what he was doing back then. He knew exactly what he was doing and it was very deliberate, which is always quite impressive. There is a lot more I could say about Raw Power. It gave me a path to follow as a guitar player. It was an opening into a world of rock & roll, sleaze, sexuality, drugs, violence and danger. That's a hard combination to beat."

"""When VU came out in 1985, everyone I knew had absorbed the official Velvets albums from the late 60s and early 70s, and had listened to all the bootlegs they could get their hands on. We had heard in the press mention of lost recordings and there were a couple of those songs on bootlegs that were hard to get. So, when this album came out it was like finding The Commandments 11 to 20. I almost didn't want to get my hopes up too much as it promised amazing things. When I did get it, I couldn't believe how good it was. It has a particularly important part in my life, in that The Smiths were already going at that point and we were a successful band. To be hit by something as a fan of music when you are already number one in the album charts yourself - I think Meat Is Murder had just come out at that point - was an utterly brilliant thing. It dropped into my life like a ton of inspiration. I was obsessed with it and, in particular, the versions of 'I Can't Stand It' and 'Foggy Notion'. I couldn't understand why that version of 'Ocean' hadn't come out before as it was easily the best one. I played 'I Can't Stand It' so many times that it stuck in my subconscious and that came out as the inspiration for the rhythm part on the song 'The Queen Is Dead'. So, the VU album was what I was listening to almost exclusively before I started writing the album The Queen Is Dead. The earlier Velvets albums are so revered that to better them is quite a feat. I have been in many an argument with people who think I am insane for preferring this record. When you take away the reverence for the early albums - which are undeniably incredibly important - VU is my favourite listen."""

"I first met Chris Bear when I was fifteen. We were both at a jazz programme and he was the one person there that was frighteningly talented, just ridiculously talented, I was very intimidated by him. “He introduced me to this and it was one of the first records the two of us bonded over. I didn’t see him again for a few years, but this record was something I kept with me throughout the last few years of high school and I always remembered this amazing drummer who introduced me to it. “That first meeting with Chris Bear has been influential in my music and my life. We were all trying to be cool kids, trading on stuff that we knew and he had this record. There’s a wildness and a subtle funkiness to it, it’s functioning within the bounds of what the genre is but it’s pushing these tiny gradations of feeling. That’s what makes really good jazz really great, it sucks you into these funny little changes in the way that people are playing. It’s so human you feel like you’re in it, like you’re the person making it happen, it’s very physical. “The playing on this is incredibly fiery, Elvin Jones is a classic player and I think Chris Bear’s drumming comes a little bit from his playing at times, but this record is a little bit outside of pure jazz. I feel in our band, and in Chris Bear’s playing, he’s always had that subtlety of feeling, you can play within any one genre, but there’s this lightness of touch and a really subtle dynamic going on. “It takes knowing the right thing to find what’s good in jazz, it’s got a language and a history and it’s easy to hear terrible shit too, I get that. I remember riding around L.A in the back of someone’s car getting really stoned and listening to the whole record was like seeing colours, it was really intense and overwhelming"

"I was 12 when it came out. I remember it very well. It was a Saturday morning, and I went round to a friend's house and he'd been out shopping that morning and he'd bought the album. And we played the album, and it was something like you'd never heard before. We were in the middle of what I might describe as somewhat traditional rock music – you know, The Stones and Led Zeppelin were at their peaks. This thing came along and it didn't sound like anything else. The production values, the production's quite dry, and also you've got this visual of Bowie with the spiky hair, it just was something so different. You felt that music itself just got changed, and that rock music per se moved into some other place. The best way I can describe it is that rock music became modern. It became a new thing. I have no doubt in my mind that David Bowie is the greatest solo artist that Britain's ever produced. I can't think of a better solo artist. The other thing I would say is I thoroughly underestimated the brilliance, and the input made by Mick Ronson, in the period he was with the band. I had no idea Mick Ronson did all the orchestration, and did all the arrangements. So when you're listening to a track like 'Life On Mars' off Hunky Dory and, this album, 'Moonage Daydream', when you take into consideration that he did the string arrangements, that really puts him in a different sphere as well. And without Mick Ronson I don't think it would have sounded as original as it did. It made me so sad seeing this documentary about him [Beside Bowie: The Mick Ronson Story on Sky Arts], somehow the Bowie machine swept Mick Ronson under the carpet, which is incredibly unfair. It was heartbreaking, to be honest. I felt really sorry for the guy that he'd been so underestimated while he was alive. At least now we can celebrate his brilliance."

"It’s the first Fellini film I ever saw, so I think it’s my favorite. My Italian relatives always told me we were distantly related to Fellini—not sure if there is any truth in that, but that’s one of the reasons we went to see it. “Oh yeah, he’s our cousin,” they would say. Growing up with Italians, you see that life is absurd: it’s a circus, with some sex in it, and Amarcord simply confirmed that for me. I can watch this movie again and again; it’s that enjoyable. And although some scenes are over the top—and yes, Fellini is obsessed with big-bottomed women and very large breasts—it’s a movie about his childhood. And by learning about his childhood, I learned to appreciate my own. When I was young, I spent every summer with my Italian relatives in Astoria, Queens. Here’s what I learned: every day is a drama, and it all ends with everyone laughing and drinking wine and eating spaghetti. There was an unbelievable tale to be heard about every third cousin. Somebody would whisper, “That’s Rose—the day her mother died, her face froze into a scowl. And that’s why she looks like that.” We never questioned these things. Listening to stories was part of the immigrant experience. Amarcord feels that way. Fellini is telling stories about people in his village, but I related to all the stories. This was a movie my Italian relatives took me to, that they wanted to see so they could see themselves and laugh. I think that by watching how much they enjoyed the movie, I began to understand and appreciate my own culture for the first time. Watching Amarcord was also the first time I experienced the music of the great Nino Rota. When you think of Fellini, you always think of the music, which acts as the perfect bridge between the stories. I challenge anyone to see this film and not want to make love. Amarcord means “I remember.” You will remember."

"It's simply a favourite piece of music. There are a lot of associations. I was listening to it around the time my daughter was born. She used to fall asleep to this occasionally. It reminds me of travelling around America back in the day when you had to carry around bags of cassettes and Walkmans. It's brilliant for train journeys and even now when I find myself on the motorway, Octet is the perfect listen for me. It reminds me of driving from Bath, where I lived at time, to London, to Richmond. It's just stuck with me for most of my life. Growing up we had Drumming in the house, my dad got that for next to nothing from the same charity shop. That's just repetitive patterns for a few hours, it's hard going really. If you came to Steve Reich from that idea, you'd think it was just academic music and not for enjoyment's sake and dismiss it. I was lucky to pick up a book from a book shop in St Helens, New Sounds: A Listener's Guide To New Music, by this New York radio presenter, John Schaefer – it was like the holy grail for me. I found that book in about '91 and it was a pretty rare thing at the time in that it had measured discussion on things like Stockhausen. We've got The Wire now, for good or bad, but to find that book at the time in St Helens was amazing really. By the time I got to America I had a shopping list of things I had to hear, like Paul Dresher, early John Adams pieces, things like that. I think the common thread with things like this is that you're constantly looking for the up and down stream of things – the connections, where something came from and what came out of it; how it got finessed or improved or whatever. I think with Octet, I'm not really that interested, it's just that piece of music. It's another world in itself."

"Crass were maybe a bit too late for me or maybe John Peel didn't play it, because that was the only place I ever heard things, so I was aware of them and I remember seeing the records in the shops but never really listened to them. And then it was by chance that I heard this record, because Jeffrey Lewis is on Rough Trade and I was in the Rough Trade office, and it was being played downstairs. I went down and asked 'what's this?' We mentioned Bill Callahan earlier, and Jeffrey Lewis is another modern lyricist who's really great, but of course on this record none of the words are his, they are cover versions of songs by the group Crass. But with all the songs that are on here, I've never even heard the originals so I don't know what the relationship is like. My favourite is 'I Ain't Thick, It's Just A Trick', but unfortunately I didn't get to play in on the Sunday Service because it's got swearwords in it, but I have occasionally when I've been DJing if it's the right kind of place. It's great that song. There's something about the way he... I guess it's a little bit similar to what we were talking about with Stallion and the Pink Floyd thing, it's taking something and... I never would have thought of listening to Crass, I had an idea of what they were and what they were about, and thought they were crusties and squat punks and that wasn't what I wanted in my life, but the way he frames those lyrics in more accessible, slightly folky arrangements, really throws them into relief. In our current political predicament those words from 40 years ago really ring true again and you hear them in a different way - the art of the cover version is to bring the song alive in a different way."

"I often listen to Simon & Garfunkel now and think they’re terribly produced, but they’re certainly a band who are perfect performers on record. There’s something to be said for their restraint; on a lot of tracks you think there might be a drummer but it’s just so quiet in the mix. When you think about what The Beatles were producing at the same time it’s kind of crazy actually - but it doesn’t matter, because their voices were always there when you needed them and that was all you were listening to essentially. They would supply the harmony for each other, as well as the melody and the words. “’Wednesday Morning, 3am’ has got this absolute perfection to it. Fleet Foxes get pretty close in terms of recording multiple voices, but it’s not somewhere people tend to go. I loved it so much, because you could sing with it and you didn’t even have to sing either of their parts; there was always room for more. I always liked choral music growing up, but I felt that this was what choral music should be doing. “I’ve always loved this particular song: just the sadness in it, the description of his girlfriend and the description of having to go because he’s committed a crime. It’s a really weird angle about these few hours he’s got left and it makes me sad every time I hear it. There’s loads of stuff that I didn’t understand in it too: a ‘hard liquor store’ for example. I had no idea what that meant! But they went to dark places. “By the time I’d heard something like ‘7 O’Clock News/Silent Night’ the whole collage thing had been done so much and it didn’t seem that powerful to me. You’ve seen a hundred films that do it now and having sample speech in songs isn’t that crazy. But I bet when it first came out it would have been pretty amazing."