"The next one is a little-known obscure album called Hunky Dory! I grew up listening to David Bowie's songs in the background. I knew he existed and knew his hits and whatnot. I had the same thing with The Beatles. When I was 17 I saw that my dad had Hunky Dory and I realised that I had never really actually listened properly to David Bowie. I thought of him as a pop star – which he is – but he's obviously a lot more than that. I remember putting it on and listening to it in the lounge and actually thinking it was almost too much – it was a collection of songs that were all so good that it was too much to digest. It absolutely blew my mind at how mercurial he was on one record. He wasn't writing songs just about love, but about all these crazy, bizarre ideas. It contained really weirdly strange anthems that weren't like anything I'd heard. I remember really trying to piece together who David Bowie was in his entirety, as opposed to him just being that guy who dresses up like a woman sometimes and was a pop star, and beginning to understand the gravity of how talented he was. I remember listening to the song 'Andy Warhol' over and over and over again and thinking it was the best song I had ever heard in my life and then trying to learn it on guitar. So, it was the moment of realising, ""Oh my god, David Bowie!"" but there is no real point in me explaining why it is such a good album. It's obvious."

"Reverend Maceo Woods was really the way I discovered gospel music. I was in the Bahamas recording with Talking Heads, the first album I did with them [More Songs About Buildings And Food] and I used to listen to the radio in my little apartment I had there before we started recording, and I'd tune into these distant mainland American stations and one morning I tuned into this song, which was called 'Surrender To The Wheel'. I thought, ""Wow! What does that mean?"" and those words kept going round in my head, it sounded so sort of Inquisition and medieval or on the other hand, cosmic. Surrender to the cosmic wheel of things. Anyway, I didn't record the song but I could remember the chorus, so I remember going into shops singing it to people and finally someone said, ""Oh, that's not 'surrender to the wheel', that's 'surrender to His will'!"" [repeats in affected accent] ""His weeyill!"", and that's how I bought this album. I loved this album so much, and in particular this one singer on it, this voice that just drove me insane. That was was Doris Sykes. So after buying all the Reverend Maceo Woods albums I could get – and they weren't that easy to get – I started thinking that, really, the thing was Doris Sykes, that was what I was interested in. She has this real insane vibrato, it's just dizzy, kind of mad. It's like somebody who is completely gone [laughs]. Something that you only ever hear in Gospel music really, and in early rock & roll you hear it sometimes as well."