"The first heard time I heard Roxy Music I was smitten. I was in a record store and I asked the guy ‘What are you playing?’ They used to put the record jackets on the front desk, I picked it up and they looked like a band from outer space. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but I loved everything about it, ‘Virginia Plain’ was just an incredible sounding song. It’s the way the synthesiser bends at the start, then the songs kicks in and Bryan Ferry’s singing is so over the top and melodramatic, I’m not even sure what he’s singing about. There’s those breaks where they jam in the middle, the keyboard and synth solos. It was the sonic template, it sounded completely otherworldly to me. I felt a kinship with Roxy Music. I grew up listening to The Who and The Beatles and they were rock stars, but I felt Roxy Music were sort of my peers. With a lot of the new wave and punk bands I thought ‘I can do this, I can be in bands and do what they’re doing.’ It didn’t sound anything like the classic rock records I’d been listening to, it was arty, very flamboyant and kind of crude in a way. It was a bit pretentious but I liked that, I found it really fresh at the time that they had an art-school approach to the music and yet the music was very DIY, it wasn’t slick. They were great musicians but didn’t sound like virtuoso bands like Yes or Emerson, Lake and Palmer, though I did have some ELP records too! I fell in love with Roxy Music, I bought all their records, their solo records and live bootlegs. I was the self-appointed president of the Roxy Music fan club in Madison, there were only seven members. For a couple of years, once every two months we’d have a ‘Roxython’ on a Saturday night until the sun came up, we’d play their albums and dress up in very flamboyant clothes. It was great."

"""If I want to pick my favourite records then I have to pick something from Motown. When you have that kind of catalogue it can be hard pinpoint one act. In my case, it would have to be the Four Tops and therefore I have to pick a greatest hits album. I never had a problem considering the Four Tops as a band. As a little kid they were omnipresent if you were glued to the radio as I was. They were a constant fixture year-in, year-out. They would release incredible songs like 'It's The Same Old Song' or 'Reach Out I'll Be There'. On this album you get to line up all of these songs back-to-back as a complete body of work, or even like a single live performance. You can hear a darkness and, dare I say it, a rocking spirit that you won't get from The Supremes or from Smokey Robinson or even Stevie Wonder, mostly due to the presence of Levi Stubbs' voice. In addition, the music had to match his voice and his range of emotion that you wouldn't even get on a Marvin Gaye record. Not only were the songs powerful, but the arrangements and instrumentation and the performances meant that, as far as I am concerned, Four Tops rock like Led Zeppelin. What more do you need? It is a collection of incredible tunes. I bought this record when it came out and all my mates thought I was either really, really old-fashioned or a freak. I knew I wasn't old-fashioned but what was the alternative? The Boomtown fucking Rats?"""

"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."