"It’s a record that always puts me in a good mood whenever I play it. Loved The Kinks when I was a kid and I learnt how to play guitar by learning from a Kinks songbook. I think if you are learning to play acoustic guitar, then The Kinks are a great place to start. Ray Davies makes the songs sound deceptively simple. There’s elements that are coming from blues or music hall or whatever, but he tends to modulate the chord progressions in really weird, unpredictable ways that are so fresh on the ears when you hear them even now all these years later you think, ""How did you come up with that?"", but at the same time they also had these pure pop melodies over the top as well. He didn’t sound like he was a smart-arse, he sounds like he has a very lateral imagination and also quite unconsidered as well in the way he must have written those songs. You can imagine him sitting there thinking, “I’m going to try this one now”. You can explain it in terms of music theory and it would sound complex, but he was “Why don’t I try this?” Dave Davies is also a total star of this record: there’s a couple of really good songs like 'Death Of A Clown' is on this record too. 'Waterloo Sunset' is on here, as is 'David Watts' and so you have those classic Ray Davies songs about social observation, but my favourite song on the album is 'Two Sisters', and it’s about two sisters, one who has this mundane life who is jealous of the other one who has this carefree existence, and I might be reading too much into it but I sometimes wonder if it was ""Raymond looking in his washing machine"". I don’t know these guys, but I get the sense that Dave was a bit wild and Ray had a family at that time, and that the two sisters were in fact two brothers. It also has this heartbreaking melancholia running through it which I think The Kinks capture so well, like very few bands can. It’s saturated with a sweet melancholia, and I think that song captures it."

"This annoyed me at the time - like Animal House - because it was not historical. It was smearing late seventies ideas of street credibility over sixties mod. I thought it very doubtful that a top face would be working at a scrap yard, for instance. But who cares? I've seen it many times since and it's an excellent teen movie: a great soundtrack, strong cast - a new generation of actors like Ray Winstone, Phil Davies, Mark Wingett and Phil Daniels, who would go on to have lustrous careers - and an archetypal loner-vs-the-gang storyline. It's noticeable that as Jimmy gets weirder, he gets more androgynous. As the film goes on, the activities of the gang get so tiresome you don't blame him for breaking away."

"In those days it was all singles. Bands would put out an album with all the singles on so you’d already heard most of it. But this was the first album with great guitar riffs that repeated themselves – AC/DC and The Kinks are definitely related. It had a great guitar sound for the time: a great riff with a great melody on top is the essence of rock music for me; you can’t get away from it, that distorted guitar with the great riff. They weren’t as bluesy as some of the others – they didn’t go to the 12-bar blues all the time, like some bands did. Ray Davies’ lyrics always appealed to me because they were so straightforward – they were always about life. Probably at the time I didn’t notice, but later everyone looked at his work more as poetry."

"Well that was a big influence for their take on Americana, and I just like the juxtaposition of their extreme Britishness and singing about Oklahoma. And it's funny, Ian Svenonius has this whole thing about how Americans only accepted black music once it was taught to us by our British overlords. The Beatles and The Stones lacked the context to realise that maybe it's inappropriate to take on this Southern accent. I feel like Ray Davies has a little more tact, like, "No, I'm not going to sing like that!" A lot of the time I will sing in a kind of an English accent - not total English, but definitely more English than country, because my context is growing up and listening to The Beatles and thinking I like the way John Lennon sings it. It's easier not to sing a hard "r", it always sounds country when you sing an "arr". I would never do a Jamaican accent. I'll leave that to Sting. Once again, see we forgive Sting, 'cause he doesn't have the context."

"For me it could be every Kinks A-side from 1964 to 1969. Just an amazing run of the most fantastic pop songs. Village Green Preservation Society is obviously a great record, but Face To Face has some fabulous songs on it. It's almost a concept record. I don't think there's any lyrical theme to it, but it's very complete, which a lot of their records weren't before. What a writer, I can't say how much influence [Ray Davies] has had on me. The artistry of condensing all those ideas into a little three-minute song is just fantastic. I'm always still knocked out by that. When I was a kid and I first went to America, in the record shops you could buy all these old Kinks records, stuff I'd never seen or even heard of. So I came back with shitloads of Kinks records and that had a definite influence on [third Jam album] All Mod Cons. Those little story songs, vignettes of English life and English characters. That was a massive influence on me."

"I really like songs that are storytelling in a way and The Kinks are great at that. “Waterloo Sunset” in particular sparked a lot of images in my mind about how you write songs and the way that melodies flow. “I think the best songs make you feel a certain way, and it’s a bit more than just the lyric really. The lyrics for “Waterloo Sunset” are brilliant but the song makes you feel like there’s a longing for a lost moment. I love the idea of two people meeting in a crowd, but with the whole atmosphere of the song, as soon as I hear it, I slip back into it and it just overwhelms me. ""There’s also a beautiful lost story within the song, the tale of a city and a river. I read that Ray Davies originally called it “Liverpool Sunset”, from when he was on tour in Liverpool and then later he changed it. “I was pretty obsessed with music from when I was quite young, and I still listen to music an awful lot. I don’t listen to these songs much anymore, but when I hear them, I love them. I think on my musical journey and absorbing that stuff, The Beatles and The Kinks were very much the beginning of it. I’m definitely sticking in an era here!"

"The Kinks, like The Who, are one of those quintessentially great English singles bands but I’ve listened to this album so many times and I just fucking love it. It’s obviously such a big influence on Damon Albarn’s writing. You know the song ‘Big Sky’? 'Big sky, too big to cry.' You can almost hear someone shouting 'Parklife!' at the end of it, do you know what I mean? On the opening track you’ve got the lyrics mentioning all the strawberry jam, Fu Manchu, Mrs Mop and all this quintessentially English stuff, and when I started getting older so I was listening to records not just feeling them it suddenly hit me, 'These lyrics are fucking outrageous. How do you get all that stuff in there and make it work?' The album is incredible. I’ve got an old album of interviews with Ray Davies and he was saying that he thought it was important that we keep all of this traditional stuff like afternoon tea, cricket and cucumber sandwiches alive because American culture was taking over the world but he couldn’t imagine it taking over England. But then you realise… oh shit… it did. What a cunt. What a cunt. It took ages to come out because of legal shit, got delayed for three years and then no one bought it. I presented him with an award a few years ago and I thought, now’s my chance to get to know more about the writing of such a great album. So I was like, 'So Village Green, tell me about this great album…' And he’s grumpy at the best of times and just went: [snaps] 'Oh, I don’t know.' I was like, 'Ok, good to get that one sorted out finally. Nice to meet you.'"

"This era of the Velvet Underground is possibly, along with Ray Davies, my favourite kind of singing. It’s sort of weedy and again without testosterone and certainly without force, it was just very, very hip and not trying too hard. It’s interesting, because did a band ever sound as hip, not trying, but still delivering? “Velvet Underground were a real staple of my generation, in that a bunch of kids in the mid-70s’ discovered them retrospectively, probably in a way that I’d imagine kids now discover The Smiths. They sounded genuinely subversive without being obscure, they were real, proper songs and there was a great poetry in there. “Often when you talk about songs to people, most people assume you’re talking about the words - to a lot of people that’s what a song is. But because I got so obsessed so young with the mechanics of the music, the production and how things came together, often I wasn’t really too bothered if the words didn’t make much sense. I’ve had amazing experiences with songs that had words that absolutely didn’t make any sense, like ‘Jeepster’. “‘Foggy Notion’ is a really good example of a song that’s just really rocking - the guitar is really hyped up and swings like crazy - that makes you feel really good and absolutely doesn’t need any serious lyrical content. In fact, sometimes - and I suspect it’s the case with ‘Foggy Notion’ because I know it so well - if the lyrics were snagging your attention too much it would distract from what it’s supposed to do. You’ve got to remember it was for young people in the 60s’ to Frug to, doing these dance moves in cool striped-shirts and cool shades and ‘Foggy Notion’ is all about that and the sound of the voice. I think that’s a great thing and something people who think songs are entirely about meaning and words aren’t aware of. “It’s an interesting thing with The Velvet Underground, because if you imagine The Rolling Stones back then, who were supposedly the baddest of the bad boys and The Beatles who were supposed to be the hippest and most worldly, I wonder what they made of The Velvets at the time or if they’d heard them. I know Dylan was aware of them, but writing songs like ‘Heroin’ and ‘The Black Angel's Death Song’, I wonder if you were in The Beatles or The Stones you were just going ‘Oh no, we’re so X-Factor.’"