"I adore this song, my wife and I played it at our wedding and it’s a ringtone on my phone. Every now and then you hear something and think ‘I wish I could write a song like that, something that gets to the essence of what it means to be alive.’ I remember the first time I heard ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ on the radio and I was like ‘Damn, I wish I’d written that song.’ The strings work so well with Richard Ashcroft’s singing and lyrics, which sum up a lot of the complicated feelings you have as an individual trying to get through each day. It’s a perfect wedding of the two of them. It’s wrapped around this glorious production and the sound of the band is really minimal, it’s mainly the string arrangement, which of course was from The Rolling Stones. If they’d just cleared it ahead of time they probably would have done a 50/50 deal on the publishing, but they didn’t, it was too late and they didn’t have any control. The Rolling Stones didn’t need the royalties as badly! I also admire ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ from a producer’s standpoint because I love its simplicity. The drums are the same pattern over and over, I think it’s a drum-loop, for the bass it sounds like they got a two or four bar loop, because the chords don’t change, and the guitar overdubs are all textural, it’s just these blips, bleeps and little echoes flowing through the mix. It’s a brilliant soundscape, it doesn’t really sound like a rock song, where you have blazing, loud distorted guitar amps, it’s got this atmospheric vibe to it and I think that fits the lyrics and the singing perfectly."

"I’m a huge Oasis fan. I saw Supersonic a couple of months ago and I loved it. I like seeing Liam and Noel interact when they talk to each other because they’re clearly brothers, they go at each other and they’re funny, some of what they say is really articulate, some of it is completely at loggerheads. I remember I was in Los Angeles, heading to the studio listening to the K-Rock radio station and they said “Here’s the new song by a British band called Oasis” and ‘Live Forever’ came on and I just loved it, I turned it up really loud in the car. It’s the guitar riff and the sentiment behind the lyrics, but the second I heard Liam singing he was just going for it. He’s got one of the greatest rock voices there is, there’s a kind of sneer almost in the way he sings, it’s all attitude. Live Forever’ was my first impression of Oasis and it’s the template for what makes Oasis sound like Oasis. I love the tone and Noel’s guitar and I like the chord progression, but to me what makes Oasis Oasis is Liam’s singing. The songs that Noel sang are lovely, but he doesn’t have that same bravado that Liam has. It was a combination of the two of them, but it definitely needed Liam’s vocals out front and centre for the kind of attitude and swagger that he would bring to the song. Again, when I heard it I was ‘damn, I wish I’d written that song.’ It’s got a killer guitar riff and the chord progression is good. It’s dead simple and like most Oasis songs they’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, in fact usually Noel would admit he was just trying to write a good Beatles rip-off song!"

"The reason I love this record, apart from it being an absolutely incredible record, is that up until hearing Marquee Moon I wrote songs on my own and when it came to putting things together with a band, I would always have in my mind that I would play chords and then break for a solo and then have some more chords. A friend of mine who is a great guitarist himself asked me whether I had heard a song called 'Marquee Moon' and suggested we try learning the guitar parts together. We sat down like teenagers and tried to learn them. I suddenly realised that you can have loops of really intricate riffs – it doesn't have to be just chords and solos. So, Marquee Moon changed my attitude to arranging - in terms of the guitars - a song. But then, weirdly, after that the track 'Marquee Moon' began to haunt me out. I had some gigs in Australia and Brazil and I figured out that if the record company gave me a round-the-world ticket it would be cheaper for them and also mean I could go to places like Thailand and Chile in between the tour. And every single place I went I would hear the track 'Marquee Moon' being played on local radio stations. It started to become really, really creepy. So, when I came back from the tour I thought I better buy the bloody record as it was haunting me. I found it for a quid in a charity shop as if everything was lining up for me to listen to this record in its entirety. And I did, thankfully, and it has just really changed my attitude to playing guitar and how I could structure things differently in terms of guitar playing."

"Well, what can I say? This is a hugely exciting record. Aphex Twin has got a huge reputation, obviously. When I was 16 it was one of the things which I had on MiniDisc, which we all had back in those days! I would just listen to it continuously. It was just around the time I was starting to make electronic music on my own, and I remember thinking, how can you make this? The technology I had and the software I had was absolutely shit, and I remember fiddling with it and thinking that I couldn't figure out how to make these drum beats so complex, and so delicately put together. Every five seconds or couple of bars something new happens. There's none of this copy and paste which all dance music at the time was doing, thinking in particular of that kind of Ibiza dirge that was shit and was on the radio 24/7. You just get 15 bars of the same thing, then one change, whereas Aphex Twin was the exact opposite of that. He would just keep your interest piqued the whole time, and that's one thing which I have always strived to do with the band, just to stop things being boring. Perhaps we push it too far, but I think all the 'inciness' and the whole thing about not letting it rest and be copied and pasted, I think is in my music as well. The other thing about that record is that it's not really a dance record at all, it's just music. I mean you can dance to it if you want, but there's lots of classical stuff on there really. There are lots of quiet moments, and lots of awkward stuff that is not really dance music."

"I think the idea is happening upon something without any clue as to what context it comes from. That has been the important thing to me. What do they think about this? Is this pop music to them? Is it religious? One very good example for me was I was in Ibiza listening to North African radio stations and this Arabic song came on and I thought: ""Fuck, I've never heard anything like that."" I had a cassette recorder in this little ghetto blaster so I managed to record a little bit of it, but I couldn't figure out what the name of the artist was or anything, so again I just used to walk into record shops where they sold Arabic records and I would sing this song, but I never found it like that. Then I was in Egypt about 12 years later and I was in a market, and there was a guy selling loads of cassettes so I sang this song to him, and in the meantime I'd changed all of the lyrics, which were in Arabic, into English. In fact, the lyrics I've since found out are ""hebeena, hebeena"", but I was singing it as ""heaviness, heaviness"". So I sung this whole song in English to him with this Arabic melody and he was cracking up. He called all his mates over from the other local stalls and was getting me to do it again. So I sang it again and then asked him, ""What is this song?"" and he said that it was Farid El Atrache. He picked out this cassette and that was the song, I'd finally found it. So to have that experience is almost impossible now."

"I heard this on the radio in the States, and I loved the songwriting. He was coming up with something different, it was a soulful folk, so I went and bought the album in LA, I thought “I gotta hear what this guy does” and every bloody track on it is a gem. I’ve always loved the sound of an album, maybe as much as the songs themselves, you know the performance, the sound of it makes a big difference to me. And now you know you can get box sets with alternate takes, and you realise then how long it took them sometimes to get the final take. The first time they did it was good, but then all of a sudden - boom - and there it is. I think there’s a good learning process to listen to the ones they didn’t let go, where the producers said “not yet”, and they persevered until... there it is. When I’ve been in a club sometimes, I’ve gotten up [on stage] and they’ve been like, “Do ‘Delilah’!”, and I’ve said “Let me just do this, which I don’t normally do"". So it is, because when you’ve made big records - great onstage, the way you do your own show - but it’s great to do other stuff when you don’t have to do those things. Not that I don’t like them, you know ‘Delilah’’s a great record, but its nice to do other things. So when you hear someone like Bill Withers doing something like that and being successful, you think, “See, there’s room for that.” There’s room for all different kinds of records. They don’t all have to be the same, or in the same vein, or chasing some things just to get a hit record."

"This was a song that I'd hear on the radio quite a bit when I was growing up. It wasn't a current song, but it was one of those that had legs, and they just kept on playing it. ""The reason it was on my mind is because I pulled it apart the other day. I do that when I'm trying to get into work mode. I might have been hanging with friends, or dealing with business or talking to my mom, so when I want to switch over to the kind of mindset where I need to be receptive to musical ideas, it sometimes helps me to just play a song that I really love - not one of my own - and pick at it. What are the chords doing here? I'm asking that kind of question. ""I heard the Fugees version - which is what brought it to mind - but the Flack one is my favourite. To get to that place in my head when I'm working, I need to do something physical, like sing and strum the guitar on a track that's not mine and just figure out what makes it tick. So in terms of 'Killing Me Softly', there's this cool trick - this cycle of fifths - where you play a chord, and then go a fifth up, and then another fifth up, and it sounds as if it's going down at the same time. You don't hear that very often, but it's on songs like 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road' and 'You Never Give Me Your Money'. ""At first glance, you might say this is a sad song, because of the tone and approach, but it's not. It's just somewhere to go if you're looking for an emotional experience, because it's pure soul"

"My eldest brother had Closer. I was listening to that from about ten-years-old onwards. Once I started to save money – working on a farm with my other brother, doing the milk round with him – that was the first time I had my own cash floating around and that money used to go on records. Unknown Pleasures was one of my first purchases. That was a key moment for me. It was my record. It hadn't been passed down. It was a completely new record in the household. That was me getting that experience first-hand, and it was such a brilliant record to have that with. The sleeve is another Peter Saville classic. The production on it is incredible. I know the band weren't happy with it, but to me it's a complete masterpiece. The use of space is evocative of Lancashire I think. The whole thing has this dank… I'm going to wheel out all the clichés now about empty warehouses and all that, but it is familiar territory for me where I'm from. Those smashed glasses at the end of 'I Remember Nothing', and the synth drones. I think that was around the time I got my first Roland synthesiser and it was another polarising moment. Something very powerful crystallised about what I wanted to do at that point. All I was capable of doing with that synth was making this huge powerful drone sound. It pointed the way. Having that induction – sat with the headphones on late at night... Music in the seventies was full of opposites. The stuff we heard on the radio was the friendly aspects of music. I wasn't looking for that. I was looking to be disturbed by it and that's something that I haven't really lost throughout my life."

"I've never seen them live, but I've seen loads of footage of them performing live. 'Hotel California' is an incredible track, or at least I think so. It's like a best of American rock, or country rock or whatever you want to call it, it's the perfect example of that genre. It's got perfect harmonies, really good songs. I love watching them with their double necked guitars and shit like that, it's just really professional, really impressive, something that I could never do. It's an admiration thing. I got into The Eagles late, about 1990 or something. I started hearing them a lot on the radio, I'd known their songs but hadn't paid any attention to them in any detail. Then when I started listening to them properly, I thought, ""Yeah man, that's pretty damn cool"". Living in America it's been interesting to discover that there's a much bigger alternative scene here than I imagined there was. I live in Brooklyn and there's a big electronic scene here, lots of people doing experimental music. The whole thing started with electroclash really, I loved that [chuckles], it was so cheeky. Since I did that record [VCMG] with Martin Gore I've been listening to a lot of techno stuff, it's not one particular artist, but I'm on Beatport every day. It's quite a revelation, I was quite out of touch with electronic music, but now I'm finding loads of new stuff. I'm working on another collaboration record, with various DJs and mixers, it's quite a long project, but I thought that rather than work with an individual it'd be interesting to get different people, get different angles on the music. Hopefully when Martin comes off tour and has a bit of time we could do another record together, because I really enjoyed doing the last one."

"I can’t really remember when I first heard this song, it was probably on tour at some point with Supergrass, but I heard it again a year or so ago on the radio on 6 Music and I remembered what a cool song it was - ‘Oh fuck yes, I know that track, I’m going to listen to it again.’ I heard The Fire Engines on 6 Music recently, their song ‘Big Gold Dream’ and again I remember hearing that over the years and thinking ‘fuck, that’s really cool’, it really reminded me of early Supergrass as well and then you hear the new wave punk thing and all the bands that The Fire Engines must have inspired. “We Did It Again’ satisfies that whole kind of throwaway feel to a song. I love the beat of this and the pace of the track. It’s my kind of drumbeat as well, that motoring, 1974 German drumbeat. I’m not really a big Soft Machine fan to be honest, I haven’t got loads of their records, but I really like the vibe of this. “I think it’s inspiring in terms of way that it sounds and a repetitive lyric is always good, I always love a repetitive lyric. It’s the attitude of track, that’s another thing that jumps out at me when I hear something, the attitude. This is kind of irreverent and offhand and I like things when they’re throwaway. They’re not throwaway in the sense that they’ve not been worked on a lot, but this is a great one for me in that if you can deliver something that you’ve worked on and it’s finessed but it sounds a bit throwaway, I think that’s a great combo."