"It's like with David Bowie - there was a bit of me that didn't want to include The Smiths because of comparisons, but I couldn't not. The Smiths were a very important band to me when I was 15, 16. It was perfect timing. In the 80s, when The Smiths were still around, I was the right age for what he was singing about to be relevant to me. I was going through adolescence so the resonance was even stronger. So yes, The Queen Is Dead. Did I choose it because it's my favourite Smiths album or because it's recognised as being the best? There's probably a bit of both in there. It's funny actually, looking back on it there are so many great Smiths songs, but there's so much on singles and B-sides that weren't on the albums, which was definitely an influence on how we did things with Suede. I remember when this first came out it was such an exciting thing. I remember hearing 'Bigmouth Strikes Again' on the radio and thinking, 'Wow'. It was a real fan moment. I remember queuing up at Rounder Records in Burgess Hill, and then playing it, and going through the lyrics. 'Cemetry Gates' was the song that I loved the most at the time, back in 1986. I thought the wordplay was amazing. Obviously Morrissey is known as a great lyricist but I think he's probably the greatest lyricist. I don't think Dylan is in the same league, with his songs about the 'Jack of Hearts' and things like that. Some of his lyrics are great, but they're not as powerful as Morrissey's. He had a brilliantly balanced dance between the wit and darkness. It was never too comical; well, apart from 'Frankly, Mr Shankly'. You know what I mean - it was this amazing tightrope walk of being slightly ridiculous but incredibly engaging and incredibly serious. And Johnny Marr's guitar playing is amazing. He's one of the greatest ever. Incredible melodies and the craftsmanship of his guitar playing without it ever sounding boring. It never got into Steve Vai territory. It was always tasteful without ever being dull. In the context of the time when musically everything was so cheap-sounding, The Smiths were making - for want of a better word - really organic-sounding music, but it was still very exciting and strangely quite ground-breaking. They were a really inspiring band for so many people, and for a couple of years they were the greatest, they really were."

"I remember the first time I came across The Smiths I hated them. I turned on Top Of The Pops, I think I was about 11 at the time and I just caught the end of 'William, It Was Really Nothing', and just remember some bloke with his shirt off and had MARRY ME written on his chest and thought “Marry? Who wants to get married?”, completely missing the point. Shortly afterwards my friend brought me the first Smiths record and we went to see them and, well, yeah, totally changed the way I listened to music. Even though I love that first Smiths record, I chose this one because I prefer the performances on this record. The first record sounds a bit ‘produced’ in a bad way, but the performances on here sound more urgent. Musically, nothing had really sounded like this before. The way that the melody lines don’t follow conventional pop melody lines, even though I think in Morrissey’s head they probably were. The lyrics manage to be simultaneously veiled and painfully open at the same time. It took me a few listens to realise it was like someone read their diary at you, with this mixture of openness and honesty and poetic allusion. Also, Johnny’s music – the section at the end of 'Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want' with the mandolin is just as beautiful and complex and emotionally rewarding with the same type of melancholy you’d find on the Dvořák record. It’s a beautiful piece of composition."

"This is the record that made me a guitar player. I got given a guitar aged nine and had been taught a couple of things on it, but it’d basically stayed propped against the corner of the room and not used that much… until I first heard The Smiths when I was 13. It was just like, ‘This is what I want to do – I’m doing this! I’m going to be a guitarist in a band!’ “Johnny Marr was like a surrogate guitar teacher right through my early teens - 13, 14, 15 years old - to when I met Mark Gardener at school. We became mates because he heard I could play the riff off Bigmouth Strikes Again and asked me to show him. "That’s how we became friends, so Ride’s got a lot to thank The Smiths for. I still find some of Johnny Marr’s playing totally baffling, like those swoopy lead parts on How Soon Is Now?.”"

"Hatful of Hollow by the Great Ones. It’s funny really, because it’s not a proper Smiths album in many ways, it’s all the sessions and everything, but I think a lot of people realise it’s the best version of ‘Reel Around The Fountain’, the best version of ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’, there’s so many variations and I think every best version is on that album. ‘William It Was Really Nothing’ is two minutes long, but it packs such a punch. ‘Still Ill’, ‘You’ve Got Everything Now’, the bleakness of the cover, the grey and blue, it sums up the time. I can remember every lyric off it. The level of artistry on that record is staggering. To think that half the time they were in a shitty studio in the BBC with an engineer who didn’t know what they’re fucking doing. Johnny Marr must have been so on it. Right from the start. I know it’s predictable to pick a Smiths album but they’re just such a massive part of my youth. That’s what I’ve realised - there’s records you always go back to. It bothers me a bit, because I should be picking different records, but there you go."

"It really is just this album. After this I think it was all downhill, and I never followed Morrissey's solo career. Musically I felt it was lost on me. I think the real power that hit me was in this record; the urgency and the energy of the record. Also I lived in France; I was a French adolescent when I first heard them, it was either 'This Charming Man' or 'Hand In Glove', and obviously in the UK it was a complete social phenomenon, everyone knew The Smiths, but in France you were really leftfield if you knew The Smiths or listened to The Smiths. And there were corners in those songs that were totally mysterious and fascinating and unpredictable. That was what I loved about them: there was a kind of beauty that you couldn't catch. I'd never heard this type of songwriting before. I think in the UK and Ireland there is the folk tradition, and I feel more depth in the folk music I've heard that's British, and more unaffected beauty. I've heard little French folk music, but what I have heard is highly repetitive, and nothing poetic or haunting or deep. It maybe had its uses at the time, but I don't feel that it has crossed that barrier into the modern world as well as the British folk music. So I don't know if it's because of that, if the roots would come from that and that differentiated it, because at the time I lived in France. But it had a huge resonance because it was new and different. It was beautiful. It had confidence and spunk to it, and of course Morrissey was a tremendous energy and singer. With the lyrics you would learn words and the meanings were not readily thrown at you; you had to think more deeply about what he was saying. The irony and all of that made it very fascinating. I don't own this record, but I'm sure if I played it today I would still enjoy it very much."