"I don't want to sound like a broken fucking record but I've gotta go Simple Minds and Sons And Fascination. I've always picked Empires And Dance, but I keep switching to Sons And Fascination. If I remember rightly it was produced by Steve Hillage, so you could see the direction they were going in: he'd been and gone and was a real mainstay of the 70s prog scene, and it just shows the ambition of this band at that point in time. They'd been Johnny & The Self-Abusers, the quintessential proto-punk band, and then they'd done their first album which is kind of still punk-ish or punk-inspired. And then you realise there's a sea change, where they realise it's not the language they wanna speak. Sons And Fascinations comes after Empires And Dance, and working with Steve Hillage was symbolic of them wanting to explore something in themselves. I think if a posh lad reinvents himself and explores avenues he gets a plaudit for it, but rock & roll history is littered with lots of working class lads that have really reinvented the wheel and reinvented themselves and they've searched for things which should have been out of their reach. And they never get the credit for it. Simple Minds are another band that happened to. This album is full of pure, post-abstract expressionism. 'In Trance As Mission', 'Sweat In Bullet', '70 Cities As Love Brings The Fall', 'Boys From Brazil, 'Love Song'. 'Love Song!' Amongst all that! A fucking amazing white Scottish pop-dance record with an industrial backbone. Not many people achieve that kind of mash-up or fusion in their lives. They were concurrently making Sister Feelings Call at the same time. Another band who got pilloried for being pretentious. But they were working class boys who were just reaching for pretension and saying, "No, we will not be fucking defined by you. This is what we're doing. Go fuck yourselves." I've been listening to Sons And Fascination again, and it's just a crowning, towering achievement for a bunch of working class boys from Glasgow, because they weren't allowed to do it; they weren't supposed to do it. People told them to fuck off and they said, "No, we're gonna do it, and we're gonna do it better than anybody else."

"I first heard the record in Joe's [Goddard, Hot Chip] house, and I think we would have been about 16 or something. He'd been told about Palace by Kieran [Hebden, Four Tet], and we would all go to the Beggar's Banquet record shop in Putney after school, and buy and listen to things in there. We'd buy hip-hop, different indie records and pop albums. It was particularly good for hip-hop, and these lo-fi indie rock records. That's where we bought the album, and we were in Joe's room where we would work on Hot Chip recordings, and it sounded so different to anything I'd ever heard before, because it's so slow-paced. Will Oldham's voice is so unusual when you hear it, and particularly at that time before he'd developed into being slightly more well-known, his voice was particularly eccentric - it cracks in some interesting ways; it's not a formally trained voice - over that sparse piano and drum machine backing. The song that I first heard was 'You Have Cum In Your Hair And Your Dick Is Hanging Out' - a memorable title! The song doesn't have those words in it. It's just a beautiful heartbreaking ballad, and it's hard to know sometimes what that dense lyrical terrain is all about with Will Oldham. Some of the symbolism is quite hard to read, but it makes an emotional impact straight away. It took me a long time to get to know that record. I bought my own copy in Lancaster when I went to visit a friend at university, and I just kept going back to it. Each time there would be another song that I would get to know and love. I had a long car journey with all of Hot Chip, and some friends of ours from a festival recently, and we listened to the record, and it was another breakthrough where it became more meaningful to me."

"I think “Pure” is a song that changed my life more than any other. I’d never really sung before or written any lyrics entirely by myself and it was kind of a first attempt. “To put it into context, at that time in Liverpool loads of bands were being signed by record companies and being given big deals. Bands like The La’s were all doing gigs and that’s how they got signed, but I couldn’t really do a gig because I didn’t have a band, so I just had my tunes. “I recorded about three or four tunes at home and during bits of downtime in a studio I produced in. It was a very tentative try, but there was a publisher guy who said, ‘I’d love to hear those songs’ and I played them to him and he said ‘We should put this out’. I said, ‘I don’t have a group and we haven’t got a label’ and he basically got some copies printed up and put it out. “We had 500 copies pressed and released it through an indie label called Ghetto and nobody expected much to happen. I thought at least I would be getting a song out there, so it was very much an underdog type thing. “Pure” just hung around and then people started noticing it - we’d sell a few hundred copies and then they’d get some more made. Then DJ’s on stations started playing it and it was a very word of mouth thing. In the end John Peel played it a few times and spoke about it, but nobody really knew what it was, because nobody had seen us play. “It culminated in me getting a call from someone in America. This station in LA called K Rock phoned me in my Liverpool flat and said, ‘Your record is the most requested record in California for the last two months.’ It was like fairy story, and then they pressed up a load more, we finished the album and it was the start of The Lightning Seeds. “That song had a massive part to play for me in the whole way my life and career went. It was a brilliant moment and it started everything. I’d always thought that music was a form of magic, or alchemy or something and the idea that I could record this song in the top room of my house on a tape machine and that it could go out across the world seemed mad to me. I couldn’t believe it."

"He’s one of those people, once you get into it, it’s very hard to listen to anything else for a while. I used to hear the name, and people would recommend him but once I got into him it was like finding a treasure trove with all these amazing albums. Retriever’s probably my favourite, his lyrics are so conversational, they reflect everyday life, the difficulty of navigating it, so perfectly. We met a few years ago, he’s real hero of mine but I think he’s quite used to lots of people, way more successful and lauded than I will ever be, people like Macca, Chris Martin, Elvis Costello, coming up and praising him. He is a bit of an artists’ artist in a way. So I got the sense that he thought, “Oh great, another person in a band that likes me but why doesn’t the public-at-large like me!”. I just don’t understand it, myself. Maybe this is the problem, he’s got a straight, almost pub rock sound to what he does, maybe that puts people off, but it’s much more layered and intricate. That, for me, is often the mark of a great songwriter where you’re lulled into thinking the songs are simple or superficial but when you really listen to them, you realise it’s articulating something way more profound. in fact that reminds me, when I finally got into him, it’s because I went to Glastonbury five or six years ago as a punter. I’d had a really shit time, it was a bit of a complicated time in my life, I kept having to go to the American embassy to do all these blood tests and piss tests to try and get into America, because things had got out in the press that I’d had a few issues with alcohol and drugs and the American embassy had said, “You’re not coming in”. I remember feeling so fucking miserable and then I turned up at Glastonbury and I just walked into this tent and he played a song called 'All In Good Time', it’s all about how what you consider to be a big deal is insignificant when you look back at it with hindsight. I heard this song for the first time and it was so resonant and potent in that specific moment, it was like, “Wow, this is exactly where I’m at”. It was like he was telling me, “Don’t worry, it’s going to be alright!”."

"Look, I'm a hits only person. When I go see a show, I don't want filler. Unless you're Sonic Youth or Tori Amos, I don't want your B-sides. Hits only. It's so self-indulgent. I picked Buzzcocks Singles Going Steady because I like that it's a little campy and gay. And the harmonies are good. It's that simple. I think with music sometimes it is that simple. It was pop punk, not pop punk as it is now, but it was poppy. I got into punk late because what I thought punk was did not appeal to me at all. I was like I couldn't care less about [whispers conspiratorially] Sex Pistols. But Buzzcocks, Gang Of Four, Wire, that's my jam. Melodic and smart and put together and catchy and the rest of it? I don't care. It's self-indulgent, like you say you don't care what we think of you but, yes you do. Singles Going Steady doesn't take itself too seriously, and it's gay. It's so gay. I think it's cool to think about being gay in the punk scene, I don't think it could have been too easy but to me that's ultimately not giving a fuck. It must be easy to be some straight, white dude and be anti-establishment. Well you're part of the problem, get out of here. You're anti what? What are you talking about? We were so lucky to come along in the 90s, because it was really a turning point for pop culture. Look at Riot Grrl, it made punk a safer place for women, and then Queercore came along and made it a safer place for queers. I think, there is a refuge in punk rock now, but that's the thing why I think the Buzzcocks was more punk than punk, because I don't necessarily think there was a refuge then. I think it probably felt pretty lonely, because you weren't disco, you weren't pop, that's where queer culture, or the gay scene really was, and to be a punk then? I don't think you could seek refuge in that. "

"A boy who was at school with me had been expelled for all kinds of misdeeds and mis-endeavours and whatnot – he had gone to what we called back then a remand school. He had finally served his time in remands and he had come home to a flat not far from my house – we were teenagers at the time – and he held a party to celebrate his freedom. 

 He had a flatmate there who was older than the rest of the kids and he put on Bob Marley and the Wailers' Exodus. I was literally like: 'What the fuck is this?' I'd never heard reggae before. Every single song was brilliant – so hooky, so interesting lyrically. My mum bought me the record because I came home I was like: 'Mum, I just heard this amazing record' [laughs]. She got me that record – I can remember it distinctly arriving for my birthday, that beautiful gold sleeve with the red font. 

 I just relate this with an amazing connection to freedom and discovery and to my beautiful mum loving me, loving on me, wanting me to be happy. Just an extraordinary potpourri of experience and a whole window opening to a different kind of music than I'd ever been exposed to before. 

 It's one of these records I'll put on every Christmas, every party, every birthday as it just puts me in a great mood. He was such an extraordinary, incredible soul and it made for a beautiful, feel-good moment in my life. 

 It also opened my mind up to other genres of music too. Up until that point I'd only ever heard pop music, soul music and rock music and here was a whole other genre from a whole different culture, a whole different way of thinking, a whole different way of living. I was just so taken by that and so curious about it. I've always tried to keep my mind open and try and be sure to explore other cultures – musical cultures – and experiences. 

 I'm so grateful to have discovered that record because I feel like that was the gateway to exploring other kinds of music and remaining open to other expressions of music."

"It's a brilliant album. What's not to like? It's universally loved and accepted as an album, as a collection of music. When you're a kid you listen to Beastie Boys because you like to sing '(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)' because it's silly and fun but Paul's Boutique is sophisticated and mature, as well as being really musical, which I really like about it. And long before I had any awareness of what sampling was, all the different bits that they use I was always curious about what they were. I always knew they were from other songs, because some of them I recognised. But it was super fascinating to me. I was already in love with New York and the idea of moving to New York. And in my adolescent fantasy I thought: ""I'm going to graduate high school, I'm going to move out of the house, I'm going to move straight to New York, and then maybe, one day, I'll get to meet one of the Beastie Boys."" And now I've met all of them! James [Murphy] is really good friends with Ad-Rock and he'd be at the studio with us and I'd go there and be with Adam, and eat pizza with Adam. It was so bizarre because 15-year-old me was losing her mind but I had to be cool. But also it was totally normal because he's just a normal guy and he's hanging out with my friend who's just a normal guy and they're doing normal stuff. But no matter how many times I meet them or see them I've never stopped being star-struck. I have to stop myself falling apart."