"There's also a band called The Organ from years ago that passed me by, that I really like actually. An American band, the singer sounds like a cross between Debbie Harry and Patti Smith. I love that."

"I love Patti Smith and the story of her beginnings in New York City with her then boyfriend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It's a fascinating look at that period of time and at two very creative people who inspired a whole generation of artists. Smith continues to be so relevant, particularly given our political climate."

"I'm a huge Patti Smith fan; if ever there was an artist who continues to inspire me through decade after decade, it would be Patti Smith. I really hold her in the highest of regard – a woman who has never compromised, has never sold herself for commerciality or success: I admire her so much for that. 

 I guess I picked Wave because my absolute favourite Patti Smith song is on that record: 'Revenge'. I could have easily picked Horses which I feel has been talked about a million times before but I always feel like Wave just doesn't really get quite the same love. 'Revenge' is just a song that I turn to over and over when I feel furious [laughs]. 'Kimberly' is on there too and I covered that with my middle band, Angelfish. 

 I [first discovered Smith] when I was in Goodbye Mr Mackenzie and the lead singer was always introducing me to amazing music. He said: ""I really think you should check out Patti Smith, I think you'd really love her,"" before giving me Horses. I took it home and played it on my old record player and just fell insanely in love. 

 I love the androgynous sound of her voice and her power. I'd always been looking for non-conforming female voices and she embodied it; I found it in her. 

 She's also never let me down. You know how you can fall in love with artists and sometimes they leave you out in the cold as their careers continue – they maybe decide to sell themselves cheap, or they fall by the wayside or they can't get their shit together. There's a million and one reasons why artists can let us down but I've never felt let down by her. She remains an incredible beacon for me and someone I always turn to – whether it's her music or her writing or her performances; she fills me with awe. 

 And you eventually got to perform on the same line up as her… 
 I had never seen Patti Smith perform until we shared a stage with her – she actually opened for Garbage. I was so embarrassed and so shocked that the music business was so ridiculous that we were top of the bill and Patti Smith was opening for us. It taught me a great lesson, actually, about what popular success is and what actually it means to be an artist with longevity. It was a humbling lesson and one which I was very aware of at the time and very embarrassed about. 

 She was, of course, as gracious as you would expect her to be. I got to meet her and I burst into tears [laughs]. But it was the first time I had ever seen her actually physically perform – that was the first time I'd ever seen her in the flesh. "

"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."

"This was the great danger of me picking these records - that they'd all come from 1974, but that was when I was most enthusiastic about buying records. And Marquee Moon… I just played it over and over and over again. I just love it. US punk was very different [to UK punk]; over here, the concept of it was absolutely fantastic, and that was the whole thing that got me into it, but it was a bit one dimensional. The Ramones were great, but they were kind of a caricature - a cartoon band. And a lot of punk over here seemed to go for that, as a backlash against over sophistication. I just felt that Marquee Moon and the stuff from New York was odd, and it was different, and it was weird - and I always liked weird thing. It still had a lot of energy; I liked Marquee Moon in preference to, say, Patti Smith's Horses… it was just contrived enough. Any further and it would be too pretentious. It's still great today; as soon as I put it on and hear those first few bars of 'See No Evil', it reminds me of when it first came out and I played it non-stop. Although imagine my disappointment when I bought Adventure on the red vinyl and tried desperately to like 'Foxhole', and it didn't happen."

"I saw Talking Heads as a kid at Birmingham Barbarella’s. They were about to release Talking Heads: 77. They were quirky and I didn’t know so much about them but they were out of New York, so it was interesting. Anything out of New York I would just buy, whether it was Richard Hell And The Voidoids, Patti Smith, the CBGB scene or Blondie. I loved Blondie and think they are one of the most underrated bands ever – so many great songs, the irony of the lyrics and Debbie’s voice and style. I put Talking Heads in because I think their sense and appetite for experimentation is pretty extraordinary. All of their records have got something on them which was so original. I love the Fear Of Music album but I think the masterpiece is Remain In Light which I suspect Brian Eno had a rather large hand in. Either way, that Byrne-Eno combination worked brilliantly together. The album had the surprise hit single on it – ‘Once In A Lifetime’ – and that again was so unique and had that quirky sense of humour in the video. David Byrne really captured an aspect of America that nobody else did. To me, Talking Heads were the great American band of the eighties. There were lots of other bands that were good – The Cars wrote some great songs – but Talking Heads’ use of percussion, their use of African music and Byrne’s lyrics were so special. For me, he is one of the best lyricists out there."

"I just knew that this was a classic as soon as I heard it. If I'm going to be really hyper-critical of it, then it's about three songs off from bring a true classic but there are so many great songs on there. It just felt like the first record I'd heard for a long time - maybe since Figure 8 by Elliot Smith - which is a really complete classic album. You know, I was thinking that this was a record that should've been there when I raided my uncle's record collection when I was 13, alongside Neil Young and Patti Smith and JJ Cale and Sex Pistols and The Trials Of Van Occupanther is one of those. That's the highest praise that I can give it; that it should sit amongst those greats. What an amazing record with a really amazing sound. Tim Smith's voice is brilliant to listen to and lyrically it's such an emotive record. You really hear the visual setting that the music is set against and that just pours off the record and out of the grooves. I loved it from the first minute I heard it. And there's something about the aesthetics of it that I really connected with. Technically, I love the bass sound and the sound of the snare and we in Supergrass really gravitated towards that. It's like the first time you hear that snare sound on Air's Moon Safari and we were like: 'That's the snare sound that we really love too!' You know, when you're in a band you look around at other bands. We listened a lot to Elliott Smith when we made Road To Rouen and when you have that connection, then it takes the album to a whole different level. That's what we all felt with the Midlake record, and me and my brother Charlie definitely rate it in the top five records of the last ten or fifteen years."

"There is something faintly off-putting about this book’s subtitle. We live in a world where the obsession with music’s past threatens to overwhelm its present, where the only music magazines that sell in any quantity deal in heritage rock, where virtually the only TV coverage of music comes via retrospective documentaries: the story of modern pop has been told and retold until it’s been reduced to a series of tired anecdotes and over-familiar landmarks. But Yeah Yeah Yeah’s brilliance lies in the personal, idiosyncratic route Bob Stanley takes through the past: for him, the modern pop era begins not with Elvis or “Rock Around the Clock”, but the release of Johnnie Ray’s 1954 album Live at the London Palladium, the first time a screaming teenage audience had been heard on record in the UK. He devotes more space to 1970 one-hit wonders Edison Lighthouse than to Led Zeppelin, delivers a withering verdict on some surprising sacred cows – Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Steely Dan – and is great at unearthing a forgotten quote that challenges what you might call the authorised version of events: at the height of the 1967’s Summer of Love, he finds the Who’s Pete Townshend not boggling at the new frontiers mapped out by psychedelia, but grumpily complaining that “people aren’t jiving in the listening boxes in record shops any more like we did to a Cliff Richard ‘newie’”. Stanley has a way of tackling well-worn topics – not least the Beatles – from unlikely angles, and of talking about artists you’ve never heard of with a contagious enthusiasm that makes hearing them seem like a matter of urgency. Best of all, he makes you laugh out loud while getting directly to the heart of the matter. The lugubrious late 70s output of Pink Floyd sounds like music made by people “who hated being themselves”. The punk-era Elvis Costello sang “like he was standing in a fridge”, and the experience of listening to novelty ska revivalists Bad Manners is “like being on a waltzer when you’ve had three pints and desperately need the toilet”. If you’ve ever heard them, you’ll know exactly what he means."