"It's hard for me to choose between The Stooges and Fun House even though they're very different. I probably bought them within weeks of each other in 1980 when I was at college and I loved them both equally, you know? The first record has some of Ron Asheton's greatest guitar leads. The guitar sound is fantastic. It's occasionally got tribal drums which Fun House doesn't have. There's a whole different feel and Iggy's vocals are sort of detached. The Stooges opens up with '1969' and 'I Wanna Be Your Dog', but then there's this mellow thing that lasts nine minutes or something... Oh man! I kind of love 'We Will Fall' for its weirdness We did the Big Day Out in Australia in 1993 and that had us, Iggy, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Beasts Of Bourbon and a few other people on that bill, and we all got on stage to do 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' and had a ball. There's something primal about all of the Stooges. Fun House almost feels like a live set. It's got the show opener 'Down On The Street', it builds up a bit more with another couple of songs and then you flip it over and all of a sudden the saxophone kicks in. The song 'Fun House' in particular is kind of what jazz rock fusion should have been instead of Al Di Meola and shit like that. There's a jazz element but with a totally rocking rhythm section. I suppose I have chosen a lot of records with the sax on, I'm not opposed to the saxophone!"

"Nick Cave is one of these very rare male artists that has managed to hold my attention and interest over the course of four decades now. He is extraordinary and continues to push his artistry and has never cheapened himself or been a desperate gambler in Vegas. In regards to his musical career, he's always just done what he does, so beautifully, with no compromise to the musical climate. As a result, [he] has created his own genre, really, that he is king of. His career is just continuing to blossom and continuing to grow. It has this incredible reach now and is touching new generations. 

 He is one of the greatest artists, storytellers and musicians that I have ever met and have ever been around. I feel lucky to be here to enjoy his work and I'm so grateful that somebody like him is out there still. He is this incredible answer or rebuke to the current climate of just completely vacuous people-pleasing pop music. 

 He's a truly incredible wordsmith too and he is really blessed with the true greatness of a writer. He's not a pop lyricist by any stretch of the imagination: he's a great erudite communicator and you can feel that in his music, in his lyrics, in his books, in his scripts. He's bordering bona fide genius with his words – just so poetic and so very honest and authentic. 

 Each record is a logical sort of expansion from the previous record, but he's a great storyteller, and a great communicator, and a great connector too. I can't think of anyone else who has the kind of career he has, where he's never had a hit – not really, in the traditional sense of a hit – and yet enjoys this phenomenal career where he's now selling out fucking arenas around every corner of the world. I mean, it's mad. 

 He's so unique and just doesn't sound like anybody else. He's got this phenomenal band too in The Bad Seeds whose musicianship is just incredible. It's like going in to listen to an orchestra because it's so emotive and powerful: to see him live is truly extraordinary."

"I first heard Alan Lomax's work while I was at university. I did music with visual art and film, but luckily at that time, it was just before this tutor left that had run it for 25 years, and he was quite old school but great because it was still fairly shambolic as a course and there was some good soulful stuff. Alan Lomax did lots and lots of field recordings around America and archived folk, blues and negro music and porchstep music. This particular album is when he went to Mississippi and Louisiana state penitentiaries and documented the prisoners as they were working in cotton fields. They've got music in their blood and that's what came through, I think. It's just absolute badass, amazing rhythms and there's a sort of sex to the music - they're singing about [sings] "be my woman and I'll be your man!", because they're obviously randy as hell and stuck in a fucking prison and working under really difficult conditions in the heat. There are different tracks where you can hear a load of axes and chains, and they would sing along to the axes hitting the stone, choirs of beautiful voices of men. 'Old Alabama's a really good one and 'Rosie' and what's so interesting is that I would listen to that and instantly there'd be a spider diagram going out. PJ Harvey on To Bring You My Love's 'Goodnight', she just stands there with a stick and hits it and there's a guy doing slide guitar. Moby, embarrassingly, sampled loads of it for free. Nick Cave and loads of artists I've loved, you just see bits of it in their music, it's that deep, dark, gothic soul, blues music. This is the raw, concentrated, original bit. There's a kind of spiritual rawness to it, they're spiritual songs about missing love and family. "I'll spend the rest of my days in these four stone walls." The fact that this mad white guy from somewhere decided to go and capture all of these voices - I know there are a lot of rights issues surrounding Alan Lomax, but I think just in terms of being an archivist, I think a lot of that stuff would've been completely lost, so it's great."

"They were an underground band who started releasing cassettes in 1982 and are from Aberteifi in South West Wales, so they weren't part of a scene. They were from a small, working class town where, strangely, an interesting guy called Malcolm Neon had set up a cassette label, releasing electronic music in the Welsh language. So they kinda fit in – he put a tape of theirs out and gradually they released more albums, which would end up on the Anhrern, a punk rock Welsh language label which John Peel started to play. By the time Pyst came out in 1990, David R. Edwards' voice was becoming the key critical voice of the Welsh language. He held a mirror to society and to himself that was so brutally honest: they weren't embraced by the media at the time because they were misunderstood. They were gradually more acclaimed for their genius as time went on. The name of the band translates to English as 'developing', so they had experimenting as part of their reason for existing. By this time, it was David R. Edwards and Pat Morgan on bass and she brought a really distinctive musicality to the band. Their first two albums had been produced by Gorwel Owen who, for me, is like a Welsh Conny Plank, so everything was experimental but also really well-recorded. And this album [Datblygu] is a mixture of great songwriting. He can – when it's necessary - write a conventional pop song but delivered in a unique way like the classic, timeless songs. We covered one of these, 'Y Teimlad', on the Super Furry Animals' record Mwng. There are some great songs on this record – one is 'Ugain I Un' which is like a generic country and western song about being a horse [running] at [odds of] 20/1 who fails a jump and gets shot before the end of the song. There's another pop song called 'Am' which is just great pop music! But [the album is] always experimental and you could compare David to people like Mark E. Smith, Nick Cave and Allen Ginsberg, people with an honesty and darkness which is timeless as the lyrics deal with basic human traits. This isn't self-consciously Welsh. In fact, it's very critical of Welsh society in the Welsh language as that's the most honest way you could communicate [this idea]. And it captures Wales at that time where there was a great non-conformist musical streak going on ."