"Number two would be The Temple of Doom, because when I was a kid I was obsessed with Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was, like, my favorite movie. As soon as I saw it I was like, “This movie is amazing.” I was so obsessed with it, and my parents… I don’t know if they knew there was Temple of Doom or if they just didn’t want me to see it because it was a little, like, edgier. Indiana Jones was my life. And then I remember at school one time someone said, “Oh, what about the other movie?” And the idea that there was another movie that I was unaware of was, like, nothing has been more of a shocking reveal since that day. And so I went and tracked down that movie, and what’s really amazing about that movie is it totally defies genre constraints. That movie is totally bonkers and totally sincere. It doesn’t really fit into any genre category. That’s what I always found so amazing and inspiring about that movie. It just seemed like this movie is so great, so any movie could be, like anything is possible. Because in this movie, people’s hearts are getting ripped out, and they’re closing up and then they’re still alive, and children are being enslaved by these sort of like ancient Indian mystical people, and they’re trying to find these stones that, put together, have powers, and there’s famine in the village, and they jump out of a plane on a raft, and everything is so turned up in that movie that it just — all the way down to the mine car race — it’s like one of the most awe-inspiring action or adventure movies I’ve ever seen. Yet it’s still totally grounded in the world of, like, this relatable character. I think that movie shows that a lot of other movies aren’t trying hard enough. Because, even the monkey brains part, it’s just such a memorable movie, it’s so bonkers, and yet it never feels like a joke, it always feels sincere. That to me was like, wow, you can do all these really fantastical elements in movies and you can still take them seriously and it works."

"An underrated Stones record. You know, they had a sound. They originally started off and covered the Beatles' songs and other covers, because they didn't know how to write songs. Everybody hung out in the same clubs back then and they'd see each other socially. So, early on, the Beatles gave them 'I Wanna Be Your Man', which the Beatles recorded, but the Stones did as a single. Their manager Andrew Loog Oldham told them that they had to write their own songs, so they went down and developed that sound. Then eventually they saw the Beatles doing Sgt. Pepper's and all this experimental stuff and the Stones decided to go outside of their comfort zone. That's what I find interesting, whether Satanic Majesties is the Stones trying to do Sgt. Pepper's and ripping off the Beatles or not, it has production value and songwriting that isn't found on any other Stones records. '2000 Light Years From Home', '2000 Man'; I mean, we covered '2000 Man'. It's talking about computers and the year 2000, it's so interesting. I can remember being at school in the 60s and reading 1984 by George Orwell, which is all about how in the future the government would be spying on us. Of course this was written well before 1984, which now sounds like a long time has passed. So it's all relative. With the Stones' music, the strings and backwards stuff, there is some very very good material on that record. They happen not to like the record. I think it's a unique record that shows that the Stones have some depth. There is some bad, out-of-key background singing because they were never the best singers, they didn't have harmonies like the Beatles. The thing about it is that they were blues-based and they veered away from it on that record and went into almost Celtic and classical areas. It was a pastiche, a multi-coloured quilt! You can look at a band like a coin and say, 'I see everything, I don't need to see anything more', but there is that other side. That other side is what I think is more interesting. The depth."

"My mate used to work at WH Smith’s record department, and the salesman from Polydor had been in and said “’Ere, we’ve got this record. It’s a bit weird, lad, but everyone seems to like it…” So he bought the lot, 50 copies. And it’s that old cliché: it sounded like it came from outer space. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before. I wasn’t really mad on rock music as such, and I was young, so I heard it with my formative listening ears, and it struck me as something really exotic and other-worldly. You listen to those songs: no choruses, solos that go on for hours, and… not that I’d compare us to Roxy Music in the slightest, but when we were writing some of those early songs like ‘Night Boat To Cairo’ and ‘Embarrassment’, they were songs that had no chorus, and verses and solos that went all over the place, and didn’t have a verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure, and I’m sure that in some very small way was informed by Roxy Music. Even down to the fact that they don’t mention ‘Virginia Plain’ until the very end, which is what we did with ‘Embarrassment’! “You’re an embarrassment…“, the last word of the song. I never saw them live, but I do clearly remember seeing them on The Old Grey Whistle Test, and old Whispering Bob (Harris) saying ‘If that’s the future of rock & roll, then I’m fucking off!’ And fortunately, it was. And the whole glamour of that album sleeve, and the portraits of the five of them inside the gatefold, and the clothes they were wearing… Andy Mackay had these sunburst crepe-heeled Toppers, I think they were called, that I spent months trying to find, and they were fifty quid even then. And you’d nick the poster off the Tube, but you’d have to rip off eight posters in one go, so you ended up with this completely rock-hard Roxy Music poster that you couldn’t roll up under your arm, and you’d try and pin it to your wall but it would keep coming off. All that formative stuff’s so important…"

"""Rather than going into the technicalities about them as a band, with The Only Ones it’s more about what it says about me as a teenage fan. I went to a lot of places to watch them, I slept in at least two bus shelters and on the kitchen floor of someone I didn’t know once. Sometimes I’d have tickets and sometimes I’d sneak in to see them and not just in the North, I came down to London and saw them at Dingwalls and The Lyceum. “Peter Perrett was feminine, and if you were a real fan of The Only Ones he had this thing where you’d almost imagine him as a really cool older brother who you didn’t know, that was the way I used to look at him. He led the gang, but he was small and I was small, and he got really involved when he played and that’s the thing, they were a really tight, great rock band. In a way he was almost like my Syd Barrett, he had a very poetic aspect to him. I was already well into studying what the rules of being a bohemian were about and he was it really. “John Perry was an amazing guitar player. Even then, when I was really learning my thing, I was aware it sounded exactly like a Jimi Hendrix lick crossed with a Jeff Beck lick from The Yardbirds, he was of that generation, probably a second generation Marquee, Wardour Street guitar player. They had a really fantastic drummer too, Mike Kellie from Spooky Tooth. They were a great ensemble and I knew they were really rehearsed and it really mattered to them. Peter Perrett never turned up like some druggy mess. “‘No Solution’ is a lesser known one, everybody knows ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’, but it’s the fan in me turning people onto one I think they’ll like but might not know. Fans of The Only Ones will know this song, but when I say fans I’m talking about the people in the audience, I think there were only five of them and I’m probably the only one still left alive!"""

"""Whole Lotta Shakin'', was the first time I heard him, in Pontypridd, being played from Freddy Fey's record shop. People used to ask me, because I loved music so much, 'What do you think of this record, what do you think of that record?' When Elvis Presley came out, I said he can't be the only one - a white man being influenced by black music in the South. So when 'Whole Lotta Shakin'' came out, my friends said, 'Is that what you're talking about?' I said, 'That's exactly what I'm talking about!' Another guy, playing piano, similar to what Elvis was doing, but even more syncopated, white and from the South. It was unbelievable to hear that record. Then 'Great Balls Of Fire' followed, and 'High School Confidential' was a great record. When you listen to his records, he always sings up, except towards when he got older and the pressures of life got on him. In the beginning, he was always up, you know the ends of everything came up. Little Richard was pushing the shit out of everything but Jerry Lee, he had his syncopation, it was like he floated. He fell out of favour, because he married his cousin - it was a shame, he was still making great records. There's one called 'Loving Up A Storm' and that's equally good. That's on The Sun Years, they're all there. I saw him live in Cardiff in 1962, and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates were there and they were slick... I thought, 'Shit, how's Jerry Lee going to get over this?', because they closed the first half. He came on, and instead of how Johnny Kidd and the Pirates were very aggressive, Jerry Lee was the opposite, he opened up with 'Move On Down The Line' and the band were like [sings] and he just walked on and was like [gestures] showing us the the chord he was going to play. He just sat down at the piano and - boom - went into it. It was like 'Jesus Christ!' You know, it was smooth, it was slick, it was rock & roll but he wasn't like, screaming - he had a different take on it and yet it was rocking."""

""I chose this one because it has 'War Pigs'. It's quintessentially Sabbath even now. They have to play those songs because they are the ones that say everything about that band. Tony [Iommi, guitarist] has said that they were in and out in a few hours when they were making those first records, and this was a pretty quick follow-up. He's a riff master. It's just riffs. It's the essence and the purity of Sabbath that I love, and on this record they really nail it. If somebody were to ask me about Sabbath, what they represent and what they've done, I'd tell them to just go and listen to this record because it encapsulates them so well. They were a Birmingham band too and I think it just shows that a lot of bands from that Midlands region were very prolific. There was a lot of activity going on in and around the Birmingham area. I've always said that the Beatles were responsible for breaking the wall around London down, because before them there was this idea that you had to be from London to be successful. But them being from Liverpool and then later bands like Sabbath from Birmingham sent a message that it wasn't the case and I think that's great. The way that the scene was in Birmingham at that time, we had a fabulous club called Mothers where everybody played. I saw everyone play there: Cream, Sabbath, Pink Floyd. It made Birmingham a real hotbed outside of London for that style of music. We were friends with Sabbath, and I've always considered them to be the inventors of the heavy metal sound. We knew each other and for them to suddenly have this massive impact with this record and be on the radio and in the NME was thrilling. It was before the internet so it took time to get the word out but that made it more exciting to watch for me. When they went to America we were in awe of them because everyone wanted to go to America. Of course we did a few years later, but that was only because of this heavy metal sound that they were responsible for."