"As a bass player and singer I liked Jack Bruce’s style. And then there was Clapton. Sometimes it was hard to tell who was singing what song, but this really influential on a generation of musicians, as was Jimi Hendrix – but I discovered Cream slightly before Hendrix. I liked both sides of Cream – the jamming and the songs – and Paul and l used to play music like that with jamming and long solos. I lost interest in Clapton after Cream, because I liked him best when he was playing through 1000 watts. I do like songs like ‘Layla’, because I’m a songwriter, but I didn’t follow him when he returned specifically to playing the blues. For that I preferred Gary Moore."

"We walk every morning down to the sea and along the coast, and every third or fourth morning we stop at the Real Patisserie. We were buying some bread in there and this music came on, so I shazamed it and it was the single, 'Clear', from this album. Matty is the best of a whole group of artists in North America who are drinking very heavily from the fountain of early 70s music, especially relating to George Harrison, Emitt Rhodes and biggest of all, Todd Rundgren. Now I've been a Todd Rundgren fan for a zillion years, and there was a point in the middle of the last decade when I realised that musical recycling is kind of okay as long as you're not doing it exactly the same. I could mention some other artists like Mild High Club and Drugdealer: they're not slavishly trying to make records that sound like they were made in the early 70s, but it's the same harmonic world, and I'm very much a harmonic world kind of person. That's how I hear music. The song 'Clear' touches on things that I just love, and the album didn't disappoint; there were four or five really good tracks on there. And then I was in the Small Batch coffee shop and this music came on and I thought what's that, that's great, and it was another track from the Matty album. I was like, wow, that guy's cool. He's the keyboard player in Badbadnotgood, who I don't know anything about apart from the name, and the fact that it's a really stupid name as well."

"I don't really know what he's doing anymore musically and I haven't known for a long time, because it hasn't been his main focus for a long time, but Discreet Music is a very singular record. I'm just talking about side A: the other side is just something else. But you can play it on almost any kind of system and it works. It doesn't require hi-fi. I remember in 1978, around Christmas, my first wife and I went on a trip to Cadaqués in Spain, a place associated with Dali, and we rented a converted fisherman's cottage. It was three storeys high and an architect had worked on it, and what they'd done was they'd gutted the whole building top to bottom, and there was a staircase that ran from near the door up to the roof, which was a flat roof that you could sit on. And the floor seemed suspended. It was an amazing place. And we had a tape of this album and the kind of portable cassette player you used to have in the 70s, but you could put it on in the bottom part of the house, not even on full volume, and the room just filled. The music filtered through the whole space. I don't know any other music that could do that. He did other interesting ambient works and his early song records are good, but Discreet Music is such a singular piece. There really is nothing else like it that exists. It's just three notes. It's so simple. There's nothing to it, but it's completely musical."

"All of his albums are just collections of songs because this was in the pre-album era, but I guess there was one in Mississippi called Key To The Kingdom. He was a spiritual blues singer who played an instrument, a fretless zither. Even though it's the blues era, he can't bend the notes like a guitar player would. He's sometimes known as George Washington Phillips. His music is really serene and otherworldly and pure. It's all very religious but it has its own atmosphere that I've not really heard anywhere else. I think when I really got into Washington Philips was when Sonic Boom put a song of his onto a compilation album called Space Lines. My sister painted a picture of him for Christmas. My sister the painting goth."

"There is an embarrassing story flying around about me faking appendicitis when I was eleven years old. Sadly, it’s true. The upshot of the experience is that whilst I was in hospital my parents bought a beta VCR player. So on the way home after being released, we stopped at a very small garage (or gas station) which had a few shelves of movies. There were no video stores yet. We hired The Sound of Music for two weeks and I watched it repeatedly, several times a day, while I recovered. Needless to say, I know every word and love it dearly. I guess I love the way the family slowly embraces Maria. She has such a good heart, and it finds the perfect home. How do you solve a problem like Maria?!"

"This was a record I got in my youth; I was really, really young. My sister had previously turned me on to a lot of different music but this was the beginning of my own branching out. I was starting to get my own identity. I had gotten a few weird records of my own and one of them was KISS's Hotter Than Hell and this one came shortly afterwards. What a lot of people missed with Bowie was that he really knew how to jam on an acoustic. They were great pop rock songs but were mostly played on an acoustic. Of course he had a great lead guitar player in Mick Ronson and when you can mix that up with acoustic playing, then you've got something really cool. I have learned some of his songs and it may not be that the chord progressions are unusual, as some people say, but it's the exotic chord choices that make the music weird. Some of those chords always make me think of a dog when he turns his head sideways and looks at you as if to say, ""Are you going to eat that?"

"Royal Trux are a band I maybe got into four or five years ago. I think me liking them has a lot to do with just how good a guitar player Neil Hagerty is, but I like Royal Trux a lot more than any of the other bands he was in. It's just that feeling of when you're making music with the right person, a whole genre might evolve from it. They are completely unique and I think that he couldn't have done it without Jennifer Herrema - it could have only have ever been the two of them. That's what's so great about so many records I like... they often have a partnership of two people and their music couldn't have happened any other way. I feel The Horrors are like that a bit because we've seen so many bands come and go in the ten years since we've been a band. It feels like such a lottery whether a band stays together or not. But, on the other side of that, for us it feels like we could never actually break up. I guess that's an odd thing to say. That's about as optimistic as I get, probably."

"After Adrian and I broke up, and I moved into my new house, I bought myself a record player. Or, actually, if either of my kids are reading this, Father Christmas bought it for me [laughs]. Not that I think they'd be reading The Quietus yet – they're six and eight – but start them young. My mum brought me some records, and this is one she used to love when I was really small, although I only vaguely remembered it. I've always loved Maddy Prior and June Tabor's voices, though – do you know June Tabor's Abyssinians? That's an amazing record, full of depth and darkness, both in the singing, and the material. But listening to this…it made me think I'm sure it subsconsciously affected the way I make music. The way the women's voices interweave to tell their stories reminds me very much of the way Becky and I sing together, although she didn't remember the record at all! The band's also fantastic, including Martin Carthy, Nic Jones and Andy Irvine. The effect of this record on me is what I'd love to do every time making music."

"I learned over the years – by meeting legitimate jazz musicians who knew Mezzrow and the people he wrote about in the book – that this memoir was filled with apocryphal stories. But it had a great impact on me because I was learning to be a jazz clarinet player, like Mezzrow, and learning to play the idiom of music that he and Bernard Wolfe wrote about. The story, while probably just a lot of junk, was compelling for me because it was about many musicians whose work I knew and admired and the ins and outs of jazz joints that I knew about and the legendary songs that were played in the legendary nightclubs. So I had a great time reading it when my own jazz passion was forming. But I know it's not a very good or even a very honest book."