"There isn't really one definitive album in that series. We were completely addicted to those Electro albums when they first came out. One of us had one album and we used to trade them between the lot of us. I bought Electro 2 and I was a bit pissed off at the time, but it's one of my favourites now. Electro 5 has got some of the best tunes on it. And Crucial Electro has got 'Clear' by Cybertron, which is amazing. Jerry Calliste, Jr. is a genius I think. He was the man behind 'Al Naafiysh' and High-Fidelity Three's 'B Boys Breakdance'. That's one of my favourite tunes on Electro 5. 'Breaker's Revenge' [by Arthur Baker] is a killer. Beat Street – the film and the soundtrack – was huge for me. I was a terrible breakdancer. Embarrassingly bad. I had a couple of moves and I could barely do those, but I loved the culture of it. UK Electro was also a key record – I found out recently that it's all by one guy. It's perhaps easy to see this in retrospect, but there are lots of parallels between Detroit and Sheffield and Manchester. I can remember looking out at the cooling towers from my bedroom window. They were maybe two miles away. You could see a big urbanised bit to the side of it. It made the landscape magical listening to that music. I think this was probably what Kraftwerk were getting at originally. Talking about it now it seems obvious, but it adds magic to your own mundane landscape. You need that. That's what happened with Detroit techno. You've got this utterly bleak landscape and the only way to make it palatable is to lend it some kind of majesty. I think we were very lucky growing up when we did. We had lots of momentous moments. Things are very fractured now. Back then, everybody had an opinion on something like Star Wars – especially boys, well, men now. We all have this notion that we were privy to something amazing. It's very rare now that something is that omnipresent. The whole thing with the electro scene was that it was a bit left of centre. I got a lot of stick for it at school. I can see why, looking back now. It was such a huge thing. It pushed you in a certain direction. I've grown up a bit now, but it used to be quite extreme. Y'know, like, "If you don't share my taste in music you can fuck off.""

"This comes from a place that keeps coming back into my life, which is Chicago. So many records from Chicago resonate in my Mancunian hellhole! When we were picking up Sun Ra records in the bargain bins for 50p with all the corners cut off, you'd go for the cover of the sleeves because on the back they'd show them playing these car parks somewhere with all this pageantry and all these weird electronic keyboards. And you'd be like, ""Oh! That looks really interesting!"" You'd put it on and it sounded like this odd, aged, Biblical music; like the Seven Tribes crossing the Sahara or something. It's very percussive – there huge sections where it's just percussion clattering away, and then you'd be hit by this kind of big band swing thing. And you'd be, ""Oh! That's really odd!"" and then there'd be an electric piano solo in the middle of that; it was just totally confusing! This was one of those records that sat around for a while and there'd be maybe one or two track that you went for. Gradually, the album would then open up for you. And then your friends would have another Sun Ra album and these things gathered together. There was a gig in Manchester in 1981, and it was Sun Ra with what must have been a 20-piece band and they had [saxophonist] John Gilmore and [singer/violinst] June Tyson in it – the classic version of the band, really – and it was like a three-hour concert. The epiphany that came with it was they did this enormous timeline that included music from the 1930s, which then went all the way through to freeform electronic wailing and synthesizer solos that went on for 15 minutes, as well as battles between trombones and really structured compositional things. A few years ago, it was Sun Ra's centenary and there was a festival in Liverpool and we put a band together to do a Sun Ra tribute. So we learnt a lot of stuff from the Impulse label records – the 50s Chicago stuff – and you can get all the music from the Smithsonian. We put in enough time to making it sound good and it was a really rewarding experience to live in that music for a while. [Saxophonist] Marshall Allen once stayed at my house. He saw all the instruments lying around and he says, ""Oh, you play?"" And I was like, ""Sort of"" because at that point, imposter syndrome kicks in, but he was like, ""Can you play two notes?"" and I'm going, ""Yeah, yeah"" and he said, ""Well, let's do it!"" We ended up setting up a recording session and we made an album in the evening, and then went out and had kebabs! But it's interesting how popular Sun Ra's records have become over time, because back then, they were practically giving them away."