"I picked Steve Reich because I think it changed the parameters of how I thought about music. At the time I was 17, playing in The Edmund Fitzgerald and I hadn't really ever been aware of modern classical or minimalism and it inspired me and also reinforced stuff that I intuitively liked in music, such as points of sounds and structural emphasis. The band Youthmovies introduced me to Reich - they had a quite formative effect on me in a sense that, up until then, I still listened to music in a tribal way, as in I had to identify with whatever subculture was going on, so I listened to Skinny Puppy and really plunged my identity into that, for example. I was in that teenage phase of tying up your fashion and your self identity with music. They also played me Gwen Stefani, Missy Elliott and Stars Of The Lid and they showed me that you didn't have to only identify with one tribe - they broke that way of thinking down. So that record was really important. And on a more simplistic level, it's just stunning. It's the kind of record you can listen to in any environment, unbound by context - it induces a trance-like state. It's a particularly good record to listen to when you're on the Underground, it's soothing - the perfect soundtrack to seeing thousands of people walking past you. He's one of my top five favourite musicians of all time."

"When we signed our record deal in America, it was a really exciting time and I remember going over there and, at that point, they were basically doing anything to sign us! We went to Interscope Records. We had no money that that point, we were struggling musicians and this woman just opened up this kind of cabinet that was full of every record that Interscope had put out and the one that she chose was Sea Change, saying, “You should listen to this one, it’s only just come out”. And I’d never really been into Beck, I’d just found it sort of contrived but it completely changed my perspective of him. It was just when I met my girlfriend at the time, who’s now my wife. Sea Change is a break-up album but we fell in love to this break-up album, it was the soundtrack to our car journeys at the time. It was really peculiar; normally an album reflects where you are at the time and whenever I hear the songs from it, I’m transported back to this really happy time when we were getting together. That’s what I like about it, because it’s so bare, from what I remember he wrote it just after splitting up from his long-term partner. Trying to convey the misery of such a messy break-up in such a direct way, I was just blown away by that."

"Nineties hip-hop has never been bettered for me. I kind of lost interest in the eighties when electro started morphing into hip-hop. It got a bit clunky for me as it tried to sound more real, it sounded clumsier. By the time you get to the nineties, you had a mutation of what's real. The production on The Infamous – sonically it's just genius. It's a shame some of the lyrics are so offensive as it detracts from how good the music is. It's brilliant soundtrack music – it carries on the thread for me of the stomach knot for me, from John Carpenter. I don't know why they were so quick to move on from the sound of The Infamous. I suppose the royalties thing is huge in hip-hop, now everybody buys an off-the-shelf keyboard and has a stab at it to avoid having to clear samples. But it doesn't sound the same. It was hard to pick one. When I got ousted from The Verve in 1995, I stumbled on Tical by Method Man. That's definitely my favourite Wu-Tang record, probably because it was my first. The production doesn't bear any relation to anything I'd heard before. You could draw a parallel with Tom Waits – it's from another world really. That one needed perseverance as well. It sounds shit at first, but then it reveals itself."

"And their next movie, Raising Arizona, came out and had this insane soundtrack. That crazy Pete Seeger “Ode to Joy” on the banjo with whistling and yodeling and it was totally mad. And every joke on it landed for me — one of the things about the Coens is there’s history in every shot. Some people say “Where do you want to put the camera?” but in the morning, they’ll draw up signs and give the actors with the lines and below a drawing from the storyboard of the camera angle they’ll be in when they have those lines. They have it all cut in their head when they do it. This is why they have control. Economy is the essence of art you know. I was looking at the detail in Raising Arizona and I thought, “We must have seen all the same films growing up because it was just speaking to me.” And it got to the part where John Goodman and his cohort come out of the ground and go into the service station to comb their hair and in the mirror you can see in spray paint OPE POE backward in the mirror. And I thought, “Really interesting this is how detailed they are.” They would take a quote from Dr. Strangelove like “Purity of essence, peace on earth” and put it backwards on a mirror and spray paint it on the wall somewhere backwards in Arizona."

"This was something of an anomaly in Faith No More’s catalogue, from a film made in the early ‘90s called Judgement Night. The soundtrack was a sort of experiment where they would get bands - white people, essentially - and they would couple them with hip-hop groups and see what happened. This was one of my first introductions to hip-hop to be honest and it wasn’t even ‘proper’ hip-hop, it was bands playing with rapping over the top. “I just thought it was absolutely amazing and I couldn’t get enough of it, this worn-out tape. ‘Another Body Murdered’ was one of the best tracks on it and it ended up introducing me to loads of bands and loads of rappers and this wasn’t like nu-metal, it was mostly edgy rappers. But then there was also a track ‘Fallin’ with Teenage Fanclub featuring De La Soul, things like that. It gave me a really broad introduction via a medium I already understood, which was bands. “But because it was a faceless tape, I didn’t really know who everyone was or who was doing what on each track. I didn’t realise then what cultural lines might have been crossed, because it was all just blurred into one: here’s the guitar, here’s somebody rapping. It didn’t matter to me at all and I think that was a healthy way to discover that sort of music."