"""I bought the first Buzzcocks album on the day it came out. I still have it in its plastic carrier bag. I knew it was going to be good as the Buzzcocks were already great. There was an excitement about being a youngster and liking the Buzzcocks at that time. Again, they were from my town and it was unheard of at that time for a band from Manchester to get the kind of commercial attention the Buzzcocks were attracting. They were on Top Of The Pops and were influencing other bands from around the country. And they sounded like they were from Manchester too. They were clever lyrically and clever musically. Buzzcocks made modern guitar music that was appropriately punky but sounded razor-sharp on the radio in the middle of such a load of mainstream nonsense, which was a great source of pride for many Mancunians. That, coupled with the aesthetic of the band and the way they did their sleeve artwork and the way they dressed, was a very potent combination. Buzzcocks influenced The Smiths massively in the way we approached our record sleeves and our choice of independent record company - because of the Buzzcocks we took on a Mancunian DIY ethic, whilst being in the charts."""

"Electro 1 represents the kickstart of that kind of music for me and a whole crew of mates. We were 13 or 14, this arty, conscientious little urban crew of kids just roaming around. It was fun, it was exciting because the music was really hard to get hold of, there was only one pirate radio station, I think it was Tim Westwood that did it. You had to tune into it on a Thursday at 4 o’ clock. They would play all these kinds of tunes, but no one else was into them. No one was into hip hop. Everyone else was into that gothy fucking angular stuff, whereas I didn’t know who The Smiths were until about four years ago. We were kind of early pioneers, well, not pioneers, we were rubbish Chiswick kids, trying to be a bit urban, adopting some of the clothes but quite naively. We all looked like total pricks. I always got it wrong and wore a chef’s hat or something. I was like the dude in the band that never looked quite right, the Gary Barlow one who doesn’t fit the clothes that the stylist’s picked out."

"I included this one because sometimes you can read things into records that aren't necessarily there. In the mid-80s I had my first proper girlfriend, we had an on/off thing for ages and then we finally split up. On the Thursday before, she gave me this Marianne Faithfull LP, so in the aftermath of the split I listened to it and heard lots of like 'ooo she's sending me a message through the songs'. I got to know the record quite well, I wallowed in the self-pity. I happened to meet her in Sheffield about 20 years later, was speaking to her and I mentioned to her about that record and she just said 'I knew we were going to split up and it was on offer at WH Smiths, it was only three quid so I just thought I'd get you that'. She'd never listened to it and wasn't making any points or comments to me at all. It shows how you as a listener bring a lot to any record. I didn't tell Marianne Faithfull the story when I worked with her... I should do shouldn't I?"

"It's another record that I grew up with. Whenever I listen to it I'm transported back into my bedroom when I was 16. Again, I love its mystery and how it doesn't let you know what it's about. It was hard to choose between this and Closer, and though there are some tracks on Closer that I really love, this did it for me, tracks like 'She's Lost Control' and 'New Dawn Fades'. I think it's a groundbreaking record, and I suppose like The Smiths, they became more relevant after they split up than when they were around. They inspired so much modern music and sound incredibly relevant now. If you heard Joy Division now in 2011 and had never heard them before, you wouldn't think it was dated. The production is great. There are lots of mistakes on there, it's really nicely under-produced. Even though there's this bleak, icy electronic feel to the music, it's not programmed or anything, it's very human."