"This film changed my life. I wouldn’t have known it existed if I hadn’t gone to see a terrible Don Johnson movie, A Boy and His Dog, in a double bill with my brother. We’d see anything in Oklahoma City to pass the time, and we were the only kids in the theatre, smoking a joint. Then the second film came on. I hadn’t known this period of Pink Floyd. It opened up a new world of music to me. I was 16, wanting to be a rock star, and they actually talked about how they made their songs. I went out and bought a Stratocaster like Dave Gilmour’s soon after. I still can’t believe I had the luck to see it."

"Breakfast Club. I was actually having trouble because I would say Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles and Breakfast Club, but that would be three. Of all three, Breakfast Club is my favorite. But those John Hughes films, with Molly Ringwald and the Brat Pack, those are my favorite grouped films. They’re just so… they’re timeless. I feel like, even when you’re watching them now, they’re so modern, and the characters are so real. They’re just so appealing to me. I watched them with my mom when I was really young. I always would watch things with my mom that maybe other moms wouldn’t allow their kids to watch. I associated with them right away. I just really, really love John Hughes."

"The structure of 'Let There Be More Light' is not conventional. It goes through different things - you think it's going to go one and it goes the other. But much more than this record, before Bill and I started playing together in Body/Head, I found this 1968 live footage of Pink Floyd on YouTube. They were playing and it was almost like people were dancing to abstract music. There were visuals and it was amazing. In 1968, they were doing stuff that we're just doing now. Syd Barrett was sitting down and playing prepared guitar, like Bill does when he does his solo stuff - and other people who play prepared guitars do. That was all really inspiring, originally to the band, I think"

"I still hadn’t really bought a record, so I was still listening to things mainly on the radio, but also watching the chart rundown on “Top of the Pops.” That’s when I became aware of more grown-up music. I liked glam-rock; we’re not allowed to mention his name now, but Gary Glitter’s music was quite good. “Blockbuster!” by Sweet really takes me back to that time because that song starts with a siren. Whenever I hear that record, it immediately transports me back to being on the bumper cars at fun fair. It’s perfect music for that. I was into music like that, but my mum would still get babysitters, because my sister was 8 at the time. So we would have teenage girls come around the house, and one of them had a copy of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. The record was broken—apparently, she had left it on the radiogram and somebody had sat on the lid—so you couldn’t play the first track on side one or side two. But she still brought it around. I had to go to bed for school the next day, but I listened to that record through the floorboards. I was actually quite frightened by the bits and bites of deranged laughing, and I wished that I had not listened to it. But I started to realize that music wasn’t just things that you listen to at fun fairs, that there was a more adult side to music. I think Pink Floyd’s music still stands up, actually. Still don’t like The Wall, though. Animals is as far as I got."

"Come on, it's one of the biggest records of all times! I remember the first time I heard that record, it was probably about a year after discovering Back To Black actually, when I was in eighth grade, so in 1979/1980, something like that. Me and my brother were living with my father for a year, he was stationed in Pennsylvania, and I went to school out there. There was a kid next door, a year or two older than me. I think his name was Dale Nadoo or something like that. Anyway, he would constantly be in his room, next to us, so I could hear him. We became friends. He had this kick ass stereo system in his room , and he'd smoke pot and listen to fucking music all day. He turned me on to two records which are on this list: Paranoid and Dark Side Of The Moon. There's so many things I admire in Pink Floyd: David Gilmour is one of the most expressive guitar players I’ve ever heard and one of my favourites. Also the fact that they had dual vocals, with Roger Waters singing as well. It's a landmark record, the biggest selling record of all times, in rock, for many years, if not still. Pink Floyd for me have always been a very visual band. When you listen to the music it takes you places, you see landscapes and characters, it's very cinematic. I always dug that about them. The care they took in the songwriting, the performances and at the production level, especially for the time: it was so multi-layered, so rich and deep."

"My first girlfriend used to listen to Joni Mitchell, and the album that she got me into was Court And Spark. I was 15 or 16 when I first heard it, and the acoustic playing is more like a jazzy sort of thing. I found that really cool. “I love her style as a guitarist, and I love the songs on that album, too. They’re quite funny, and they put you in a certain mood, like Free Man In Paris and People’s Parties. I like it a lot more than Blue and a lot more than Hejira, and the other ones that people go on about. It’s just really good. “Nick Drake’s Pink Moon [1972] also deserves a mention as a very important acoustic album for me. Can we have it as a bonus record?"

"After Patti, I sold all my record collection because I felt I couldn't have any music around me that didn't do something to me like Horses did. For about six months, I had no other records, except Lou Reed's Berlin as I felt that was comparably powerful and emotive. After those six months, punk started. I thought punk was fun and it reached the anger in me that needed to come out. I had been sent away to school; being sent to a boarding school was like being sent away to prison by parents who apparently loved you. So, I had a lot of anger and distress at this strange turn of events and I started going to punk gigs. The first gig I organised to see was the White Riot tour with The Jam, Buzzcocks, Subway Sect and The Slits. It turned into a bit of a riot and we were these schoolboys in our uniforms with one teacher to chaperone us, and suddenly chairs and tables were flying through the air. After that, I was banned from organising any more trips to punk gigs. So, even though I was banned, I decided to get the school magazine to employ me as a journalist. I would try to interview the first local punk band that came down to Shrewsbury. That happened to be Wire, who were a fascinating band. I think Pink Flag is one of the only punk albums that has stood the test of time. It is a remarkable piece of music. There are songs that last 45 seconds and others that last two or three minutes. It is quite a feat to pull off a 45-second song and make it work. Wire were wonderful to interview – intelligent and articulate – and their music was brutal and yet humorous at the same time, which was a very odd thing for punk. To call an album Pink Flag, after the label that the Nazis put on gay people in the camps, was an incredibly brave thing to do in such homophobic times. Punk, although liberating in many aspects, was pretty homophobic until Tom Robinson came along and confronted it directly. Pink Flag was a miracle of creativity in these short, harsh little songs. Even to this day, when I listen to it, I think it is a masterpiece. I think it would have influenced a band like Pixies. I don't know if Pixies ever heard Wire, but I would be very surprised if they hadn't."