"Me and James were obsessed with the NME ‘100 Best Albums Of All Time’ in the mid 80s, so we started buying as many as we could - Marquee Moon, Blonde On Blonde, The Clash... some of them we had anyway, but then there were things like Pet Sounds, which was really high, and when you’re 14 you think of the Beach Boys as fucking idiots going “doo wop”, don’t you? We both got What’s Going On and I think it’s the first time I realised, in an exotic way, that politics could translate. Through colour, through country - you could still feel the desperation of someone else even though it was your first exposure to music like that. Obviously my Mum and Dad had tons of records, but the intimacy of playing that in your bedroom and being transported to another world of the same anger you were feeling, but then in such a graceful way. ‘Inner City Blues’, the title track, ‘Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)’. There’s lot’s of brackets - lot’s of songs with brackets. I love that idea of brackets. I love the cover. You can still put it on today, and obviously in the studio we have lots of vinyl and a record player - you put that one in particular and it drifts, it seduces you but it also stimulates."

"I was listening to this a lot when Supergrass were making Diamond Hoo Ha over in Berlin. This was the record of that album for me and I was listening to it over and over again. I love the rawness and the vocal performances. When I first heard it, it was unlike anything I'd ever heard before. It was different and I love Tom Verlaine's vocal quality; it's really androgynous and like the male Patti Smith. It had that delivery and I love it. I've never been drawn into the alternate tunings that they used and so I've never delved into that. I'm probably not enough of a nerd about other people's music to do that. But their playing is never pompous or self-indulgent. It wasn't guitar duelling but Television are very sensitive to their instruments. Everything had its place but I think I was drawn to it because of the band I was in. This was what we aspired to in terms of Mick [Quinn] being a brilliant bass player so we let him speak with what he was doing. And you couldn't tread over Danny because he had these amazing bass fills and we had that internal dialogue where everybody got to speak. The best bands are the ones that connect that way and are really on fire when there's that understanding between each other."

"I was 11 when this film came out and it was the first time I ever went to see a film twice in one week. It blew me away and changed my life. Not just the film, but largely [György] Ligeti's atonal choral pieces. This discordant, sometimes beautiful, intertwining of voices, that were dark and then beautiful and then disturbing and then uplifting. I went out and bought the album, and then put it on my record player in my room and shut myself in my wardrobe with a flashing light and spent hours in there. I wanted to shut myself off from the world and immerse myself completely in this extraordinary sound. And I went on to be an artist that built environments and quadrophonic sound spaces – purely based on this experience. And years later, when we came to write the score for Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, I said, "do you think 2001 can be referenced?" and Danny said, "absolutely", and that was just like heaven for me. This album is at the core of where my head’s at. One minute it will be playing some Brahms and then it’s playing this beautiful, yet discordant, choral music and I think like that now. This is the rhythm of my bones. Something for the future is to score for a choir."

"I'd been into music for as long as I can remember, from being four years old. My dad bought me a record player when I was 11, and I went out and bought three albums: I had those Beatles double albums, the red and the blue, '62-'66 and '66-'70, I bought those, and I also bought Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones. That was the first Stones album that I bought. I actually wore it out, and parts of it became unplayable, even with halfpenny pieces on top of the stylus. For me, the Stones, when they pulled away from the Beatles' influence and became their own thing, it started with Beggars Banquet. It's those four albums - Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Exile and Sticky Fingers, I think are the greatest years of the Rolling Stones as an individual, this is what we do, we're not following the Beatles any more. And they did it with such glory that I could easily have chosen [another] one of those four albums for the same reason. Once again we seem to be talking about unsung heroes, one of the great things about those Stones albums is the brilliant engineering by Glyn Johns; I think Andy Johns was involved as well, but the engineering on those records is just awesome, awesome, awesome."

"Similar time to The Human League obviously - it's just another synth-pop classic. It's when O.M.D. still had a much more experimental edge and yet similarly to the League, they had some stonking tunes, the two 'Joan Of Arc' ones, and 'Souvenir's on that as well, which I absolutely adore. I remember I bought the single of 'Souvenir' and probably the single record that I have played most in my life. I just kept it on repeat on our old record player in the house. That would have been in Enniskillen Woolworth's, probably along with Roland Rat or something - everybody buys shit records at the time as well and accidentally buys good ones when you're that young. I hold all of the above in mind when writing music and yet you're also trying to expunge them from your mind as well! It's a very complicated process - you can't help being the sum of your parts and you can't help little bits of the things you love coming out. If a certain chord does a certain thing in one of those songs that makes you kind of tingle, then you're looking for the tingle, but you're not looking to do it with the same chord, if you know what I mean! So you might use the same kind of mechanics but not the same notes."