"We're keen on the White Album because of the way we're making a lot of this music now. I feel like they had a lot of music, and they weren't that worried about the very nuanced production they had delved into with George Martin. It's one of those records that's kind of sloppy, recorded in strange rooms. It has this weirder, drug-damaged vibe about it. For me, I think that The Beatles could not be any greater of a group without a song like 'Revolution 9'. I wouldn't have embraced them as much. Even though I was very young I always thought 'Revolution 9' was just as valid, just as listenable, just as perfect as 'Strawberry Fields Forever', something that has a lot of structure, melody, lyrics. I didn't realise until later how retarded that was. When we started writing songs and learning how to produce records we started to see what a strange, disturbing collage it is. Luckily, that was what I built my world of creating music on: thinking anything that you wanted to do was possible. They'll have these experimental moments, and even Paul McCartney, who's perhaps not as artistically experimental, there's that thing, [sings] "Can you take me back where I came from" [the fragment that follows 'Cry Baby Cry']. [It's] Thirty seconds of him not really having a song. Listening to that when I was young, somehow, is the cornerstone to me remembering that anything's possible - that you don't have to worry about thinking everything through before you do it."

"If this list was only five albums long, this would definitely be on there. It's so incomparably good. I think spiritual jazz coming out of America in the late 60s and early 70s is my favourite music in the world. It has everything - big melodies, big production ideas, a heavy kind of rhythm, a really wide palette of sound, so you get that kaleidoscopic playground kind of feel because the texture is so dense and interesting… I guess it's funny how much it shouldn't connect with me because I'm an atheist, but so much of the music on this list is explicitly spiritual music. There was a Brian Eno Red Bull lecture, and Kieran was there and he asked him this very question: ""Why is it that so much of my favourite music is spiritual music?"" and Brian Eno's answer was pretty good. It's about that sense of release, disposing of your ego, and opening yourself up to be more receptive to different musical ideas. I don't mean that you're receiving some kind of spiritual energy - at least that's not my take on it - I just mean you push aside considerations of ego and being cool, maybe that's what it is. This record just seems elemental. It seems to have come from somewhere deep down and really says something about being human. Music means so much to me, it's so central to my life, and the music of Pharoah Sanders is so committed to the potential of music - what music can do, what it can say and how it can communicate with people. It's in no way cynical. It's inevitably going to resonate with me, because I believe in music so much."

"I discovered this album relatively late. I liked funk, and disco was an earlier discovery for me when I was in my late teens. But, around 1985, I found Sly And The Family Stone. I was about 23 at the time and – wow – was that a discovery, not knowing that that particular album was out there before then. I played it from morning until night before we were doing the Notorious album, which was very influenced by Fresh. For me, it is the greatest funk album. I could have picked a James Brown album – I love Live At The Apollo, which was such a terrific record – but the songs on Fresh like ‘If You Want Me To Stay’ and ‘In Time’ are just masterpieces. Fresh has got such a mood to it. It is very difficult in the studio to capture a mood. In a live show it is easier because there is an atmosphere there already – you’ve got the audience, you are playing together, there is a danger something can go wrong any minute and you will take a song off somewhere and you cannot get yourselves back. But, doing it in a studio and capturing a real vibe is the apex of music. If you can do that and you can get that – then you have something great. The Stones were always very good at that, as were The Who early on. But, this album, Fresh, is just pure vibe and every time I listen to the organ swells in the songs I can almost feel the guy playing them. You don’t get that so much in modern records. That’s what we’ve lost. Andy Newmark played drums on the album and they are some of the greatest drum tracks ever recorded. It’s not just feel – it is vibe. Love it."