"It was one of my cassettes but I think that this is my favourite Beatles record. When I was really young my older brother were really into them. There was a very small selection of records in the house so we just listened to those records over and over again. Two of them were The Wall and Dark Side Of The Moon, one of my brothers was big Pink Floyd fan. Another was Dire Straits, Brothers In Arms, and Don McLean's American Pie, and the White Album, which led me to other Beatles stuff. But I love Abbey Road because it's so clearly an album, in that there's clearly a first song and a last song and all the songs in the middle are in an order. You couldn't listen to Abbey Road on shuffle and I like that. I think we've lost a lot of that these days. Things end up just being these singles and no one really buys albums anymore. Albums just aren't constructed that way as much anymore; the whole, the complete package, a narrative, an arc. The first copy I got had somehow been fucked up in the manufacturing process or something because side B was on side A. I remember the first time I listened to it I was listening to it out of order and it sounded weird to me, it felt weird. Then when I realised that it was backwards I listened to it again in the correct order and I was like, "oh, I get it". I also feel like the songs on that record, save for 'Octopus's Garden', also have some darkness about them, which I really like."

"Roy was about the same time. The Old Grey Whistle Test was on later than Top Of The Pops, and you had to be a bit older to stay up late and get away with it. I got my first sighting of Jobriath on there. I don't know if I saw a flash of Klaus Nomi on there too, and of course David doing 'Queen Bitch', Roxy doing 'Ladytron', and the New York Dolls was quite a moment for some people. It was via Genesis doing 'I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)' from Selling England By The Pound, that I became interested slightly in that longer haired world. I didn't go for Pink Floyd; I thought there was something not quite right about hippies, and you were either a hippie or not a hippie. Somehow, I heard the track 'Hallucinating Light' by Roy Harper, and was amazed by the quality of his voice. And of course, he had Chris Spedding playing guitar - David Gilmour plays guitar on the album also - but Chris had a sort of slightly Roxy Music edge to him as well. It is just a great album. 'The Game (Parts 1-5)' is a brilliant song sequence and it just appealed to me, as a perfect artistic statement. None of my other friends got into it, it was almost a guilty pleasure, but there was nothing to be guilty about because it was just a great record. The track where he has the colliery band - 'When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease' - is beautiful. It's hard not to shed a tear - it's a lovely song. He also had connections with Led Zeppelin, who I wasn't interested in at all, but a lot of people only know him because he sung on one of their tracks, but for me he was something outside of that."

"It's an album that had a massive effect on me when I was young. I remember on Steve Lamacq's Roundtable, there was a track from Journal For Plague Lovers which a member of Wire completely slagged off. So this shows how much I actually like this album, because he obviously hated us and thought were just plod-rocking, rock-dinosaur philistines. But despite that I'm still going to quote this as a really influential album for me. A lot of people pick Pink Flag and Chairs Missing as their favourite records, but for me this is the apex of their achievement: they're still fusing really blunt-edge experimental rock with really abstract notions and wild ideologues and monologues of different sorts. There's a song on there called 'The 15th' which is just an amazing song; there's another song called 'The Other Window', which has a direct lineage from some of the Velvet Underground narrated songs like 'The Gift', and it's about this guy travelling on a train and outside there's an animal dying in a barbed-wire fence. There's another song called 'Two People In A Room' which is just fucking brutal. A lot of people like Wire then they're bleak or when people couldn't get a handle on what they were saying, but I think on this you can pin down the emotion to the record, pin down the marriage of experimental edge with rock. For me, it's one of the great lost post-punk records. It's an amazing record that never really gets written about. It was produced by Mike Thorne who never did as good a record again. And I just love the cover: it's got a very… almost Mondrian kind of vibe to it. It's really strange and quite unsettling. I just love the record."

"This was a bit later in my life, around 2000. This signals the end of me having hang-ups really. I remember when 'Re-Rewind' by Artful Dodger came out, and I thought, ""This is fucking cool!"" So much about it confused me. It didn't have chords or a bassline really, it was made of odd sounds like breaking glass that didn't really fit. And then it had this guy on top of it singing this really pleasing, really hooky, catchy little melody. It was the furthest thing away from me at the time. I was into crashing drums and cymbals, but I knew there was something in there that really turned me on musically. When I admitted that I liked that to myself, it really opened up a lot of doors to me, into R&B and Destiny's Child and R. Kelly, lots of stuff that would have been previously out of my usual sphere of influence. I embraced it, and there were things I really liked. With people like R. Kelly, I spend 50 per cent of the time laughing at him and the rest thinking, this is actually good. A huge influence on my music is the singing quickly, and the singing something absurd, and then something serious, hooky, melodic, quick and light. Craig David did that brilliantly. The singles on that album are fucking amazing! He kind of lost his way after that, but I wanted to show that that whole world is very much embraced by me, and to show that we shouldn't be snobby, that it doesn't matter whether the influence is The Cheeky Girls or Pink Floyd, it just doesn't matter where it comes from. If it's good, I embrace it, and I think Craig David is a perfect example of someone who is laughably bad but secretly a pretty good artist."

"I'm reminded how great it is all the time. It's a weird record, it has passages that are just fucking weird bleeps out of a synthesiser. People dismiss it because it's so popular, and I would tell them if they heard pieces of it they would think it's some freaked out indie group with these great old synthesisers. It's just so well done. There are these strange, jazz elements to Pink Floyd that I think musicians notice. I don't think the audience cares - these neat little things they do that make it their own trip. These combinations of chords and notes that just aren't typical. I suppose to me, it's universal music. I think they do this reptilian brain version of universal, emotional music and they use these very simple build-ups and harmonies, and they nail it on that record 20 different times. And to know that they end on one of the great crescendos that they've ever done, that bit in 'Eclipse' where they sing "all that you touch, all that you feel"… the way that builds up, no-one is ever going to do it that perfectly again. Those simple words, those simple themes, building, building. And you've got to remember it's Roger Waters singing. He's not a great singer, but it highlights this thing - it's a motherfucker, you can't write a song that great. You just have to hope that something happens. For them to end on that [sings a spot on Waters impression] "the sun is eclipsed by the moon." Blammo! Then that heartbeat, it's fucking phenomenal. It's easy to dismiss it because it's so popular, but I would say to anyone they should secretly listen to it and then discover that 'oh my God, it's awesome'."