"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."

"This was also quite a challenging record for me. I bought the 7"" of 'Ceremony' when it came out, and I thought that's what Movement was going to sound like. A very pretty, emotional, bucolic record, and of course it has moments like that, but in a strange way it's almost darker than Closer. When I was 14 or 15-years-old I was full ensconced on the cult of Ian Curtis, so when I got Movement I listened to it and tried to decode it... how many songs were influenced by Ian Curtis, how many songs were written by Ian Curtis, were they trying to communicate with Ian from beyond the grave. It's certainly the darkest of all the New Order records, and after this they became much more melodic and happy. The first track on the record is quite uplifting, then everything else is quite dark. One of the things I've always loved about Bernard Sumner's voice is there's a naive, vulnerable quality to it. I was at an airport the other day and 'A Perfect Kiss' came on, I hadn't listened to it in about 25 years, and it's such a perfect song. His vocals are sing-songy, like a nursery rhyme, but they're so effective. Each of these records that we've talked about, one thing they have in common is that they're all primarily electronic. At the time I was completely surrounded by very traditional rock music, and it felt interesting and subversive to be listening to these records primarily made with electronic instruments. I think that affected me a lot. I was a guitar player at the time, and I was so bored and frustrated with playing the guitar because it didn't do that much. I couldn't figure out how to make a guitar not sound like a guitar, and then you hear all these electronic records with all these textures and atmospheres and sounds that I'd never heard before, and I found that quite exciting."

"I listened to that record non-stop, it was a record that was in my house when I was really small and I knew the whole thing back and forward by the time I was six years old, as that's one of the many times we moved. I remember listening to the song 'So Far Away' in our station wagon as it pulled away from my neighbourhood and waving goodbye to my best friend. Throughout my life I've had a different favourite song on that record for a different reason and it sort of stayed with me. When I was a karaoke host, one of the first songs I did was 'I Feel The Earth Move'. I think her story is so interesting, too, of starting out as a songwriter and not feeling confident and then deciding to put out her own songs with her own voice. That was a really empowering story when I finally learnt it. I just thought she was this cool, powerful '70s woman with her curly hair and swirly skirts. I found her fascinating as a person as well, like a role model. She played piano, sang and wrote the songs, and everyone knew that, it was really implicit at the time, that it was her album. A lot of singers, male and female, were singing songs written by other people and Carole King had been writing songs for those people, then this album was like, "I'm writing it for myself." I didn't know she wrote 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow?' until I heard her sing it and her version was so different than the popular version that I'd heard and I was like, "Wow!" It was a great album in the vein of Thriller – every song on that record could be a hit. And it was like she made it; I knew a woman made it from start to finish and I knew I could write songs. It was something that everybody had that was very popular that actually still holds water and it's really good."

"This record was 1958 and it was already a 25-year retrospective so that means it spans from 1932/3 to 1958! It came to me at the same time as all this new wave stuff and I was really interested in all the stuff Cage was doing with prepared piano, and there’s a bunch of prepared piano on my new record. Between those pieces and orchestral works for multiple players where Cage was using people banging on metal break drums and stuff, it was really sounding like the gamelan music I was listening to at the same time and I just found it to be super inventive. John Cage was defining a new way of thinking about music in the 20th century and in a way his definition included all of noise and all of ambient sound and all of these things that became movements for us in the 20th century, like Eno’s whole discreet music and ambient thing; or noise music from extreme harsh Japanese noise to whatever we called Neubaten or what Sonic Youth were doing, if you called that noise music; or the Boredoms or Merzbow which is more extreme, there’s no singing, there’s no guitars, it’s just harsh noise – this music opened the door for all that stuff. It’s amazing music in it’s own right, and yet some of it also explores really low volume like super quiet aspects of music where background sounds and people coughing – well that’s part of what you’re hearing in the experience too. So I felt like that record is so important that it defined a gargantuan giant of the 20th Century, which is John Cage, but it defined all these different bits of music that even if people later didn’t realise their music stemmed from that, in some way it did. Everything from 60s onwards, no matter what you were doing outside of rock & roll there was some kind of influence from Cage there."

"[sings] "I got a crush on us!" He's like "vampires came and vampires went, I won't forget this magic feeling", just so geeky, fucking brilliant lyrics, full of cliches, but done in the most hilarious way: "not stupid stuff like your cousin wrote". What the fuck are you talking about? I remember at the time seeing American Splendor, which is this film about Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar who's this comic book drawer in America, and I was listening to Jad Fair, and there's the whole [adopts nasal American accent] "nerd" thing that's a big part of my teenage music taste. The awkwardness of being in love and the geekiness of American culture. Terrible B-movies with Nicolas Cage, that was a big part of my university life, the trashiness and the shitness. I just really like how he talks about falling in love, the whole album's immersed in Halloween party punch, you're just at this geeky Halloween party he's talking about, and he's like "I love you more than soda pop", "you pop on my tongue and I'm so happy", loads of amazing American cultural references, that as an English kid, it's so cool. You get it. I like the hybrid of Teenage Fanclub and Jad Fair, because I couldn't say I was really into TF, but something happened, I just discovered that album and being in love with someone, my boyfriend at the time, we just loved that album because it's just so happy as well. It's innocent and happy and unashamedly geeky and loved-up. There's so many times you listen to that record and it makes you smile, and there's a lot of darkness and heaviness in my list, so I would recommend that album to anyone. First thing in the morning, summer in your car. It's got a real identity, that record, more than any other, it's a real thing in itself, you totally know what you're going to get and you totally love every moment."