"I could name a whole lot of well-known artists from anywhere in the world who have made great records but maybe it's more interesting if I pick up on things that I've grown up with that, for geographical reasons, aren't known much outside this particular Welsh language culture. These records aren't talked about everyday in the English language. Someone like Geraint Jarman, with Datyblgu, might be the most powerful Welsh language music [of its time]. He is from a generation earlier [to Datyblgu] and started releasing solo albums in the mid-1970s. He was part of the folk movement in the late-1960s and was in a band with Meic Stevens and Heather Jones called Baramenyn. They were making almost pastiche folk music that was critical of folk music but the records were really popular! They were almost like Os Mutantes without the fuzz! Geraint was a poet first and wrote really good poems like Gil Scott-Heron. He had those skills which he applied to rock music in the mid-1970s. He also had an amazing band who could record an album in a couple of days and an amazing guitarist called Tich Gwilym. This album is like a mid-1970s rock album but informed by punk - Television are in there, too - but it's got that grounding in songwriting from the folk days as well. You can get lost in the guitar playing as well and the lyrics are risqué for the community he was singing to at the time - Wales was quite a religious place in a non conformist way. But it's not kitsch music, it's very much engaging with its day and Geraint grew up in urban Cardiff in a Welsh speaking family but with connections to the Romany world. Like a lot of bands from elsewhere in Wales at the time, he was part of a multi-cultural society, a lot of his friends from school were in reggae bands and he gradually got more and more into reggae. You can hear this in this record but it's also a rock record. By the end of the 1980s, he was playing at Reggae Sunsplash so it's interesting...he was still [singing] in the Welsh language! He's still singing and putting records out. He also pioneered a Welsh television show called Fideo 9 which was like Snub TV or something and he put a lot of energy into that. He was also the voice of the cartoon character Super Ted!"

"This was the record that sold me on that band. When I lived in Sacramento California I lived right next door to this little club called the Press Club, and they were playing there. I was sitting on my porch and their van pulled up and I started talking to them. That was when they were touring that record, and it was my favourite record at that time. It's heavy, but it has a lot of groove to it - I don't know if there were too many groups who were doing that kind of riff rock, but it had all these discord sounds to it, and then two bass players, one of them using distortion the whole time and the other guy holding down the low end, the keyboard player playing vibes. It didn't sound like anything else at the time. They were from DC, where a lot of my favourite bands are from, like Fugazi, Minor Threat, these bands who started a lot of scenes in music. I never got too into political rock and roll, obviously great lyrics are great lyrics, but what grabs me is the cadence of the singer, how they choose to deliver the words. And that dude, he had this raspy voice, this distinct voice, to me it was more sex, he has this loungy kind of vibe. Lyrically he seemed to talk about partying, drugs, and girls."

"When I was young I always dug listening to live concerts. It was like we were there. I always think that live albums are a good way to represent a body of work anyway because it shows the songs as part of a collection better than, say, a greatest hits record. It wasn't so much that Cheap Trick At Budokan was live, it was more the selection of songs. Rick [Nielsen] was really an amazing showman as a guitar player as far as the tricks that he did were concerned. Plus, the power that he had despite being essentially a three-piece rhythm outfit was amazing. Then you had Tom [Petersson] with his twelve-string bass… Whoever thought someone would play something like that? I could have done without some of the squealing but having gone to Japan so much; I get it. That's their way of showing you that they loved you. I never really considered Cheap Trick to be a glam rock band. People forget that Rick used to have long hair before he transitioned to having short hair and wearing baseball caps when they supported KISS in 1977. Take a song like 'Hello There'. It has such a killer, punk rock attitude. It reminds me of Mötley Crüe doing a song like 'Live Wire': you don't expect that kind of aggression and when you hear it you think, ""Alright, you dudes can let it rip when you want to.""

"When I was 15 and living in Conneticut, me and my friends started creeping into New York and going to nightclubs in '80, '81. You'd go into New York specifically with the intention of seeing punk rock bands, but a lot of the clubs at the time like Danceteria, Fall Out Shelter, they'd have a punk rock band playing but the DJ before would be playing dub reggae, and the DJ after would be playing early hip hop and electronic music. There was a radio station in New York called WNYU, and they had this three hour long show every afternoon called The New Afternoon Show where they just played new music. I remember them playing 'Der Mussolini' or 'Alles Ist Gut' and having that same reaction as I did to many of my favourite records at the time, which was 'I've never heard anything that sounds like this'. Another reason I loved D.A.F. was because at the time I was living in this very depressing, boring American suburb and I would listen to D.A.F. and imagine how cool it would be to be in Berlin, making weird electronic music with these German guys who only wore black and made songs that, I didn't know what the lyrics were saying, but they sounded cool. I just re-bought Alles Ist Gut, I have the vinyl and CD and just bought the iTunes version of it, and it still sounds amazing."