"This is another case of, "Where's my Radiohead gone?" Hearing Muse for the first time was like, "Holy shit, this is like Radiohead, but heavier, and more pop, but also darker as well", and I just absolutely fell for it, hook, line and sinker. I was at the perfect age, was just getting into actually being good at playing stuff, and Matt Bellamy was all over the place in terms of his musical talents, playing the piano and guitar, and stuff that teenagers love. Stuff that sounds flashy and complex and twiddly but is actually not. And the bass player! Fuck me, the basslines on the album! Bass players don't do that kind of stuff! He's the sort of main character in an awful lot of those songs. It was an absolute revelation. I was a bass player before I was anything else, and I remember thinking, "Holy shit that sounded ace"! They ripped up the rulebook in so many ways for rock music. It was so enjoyable as well. Every song had a real sense of performance and razzmatazz. Of course it's called Showbiz and it is a type of show. So I think, more than anything, that's probably what you would say about my band, particularly live - we're not subtle, it's over the top. Whether people like it or not, that's got into us now and it's hard to take a step back."

"This one is the opposite of eclectic! I was a Cult fan anyway. A lot of people at school were into goth and I wasn’t so popular because I was into rock, but I felt like the Cult fell right between the cracks of those two scenes. And then there was the Manor Sessions and the stuff that they recorded for Electric that was recorded in the more traditional cult style. And I love the story of Rick Rubin telling them to throw all that stuff away and to use Les Pauls and simple sounds – basically trying to make them sound like AC/DC. A lot of bands tried to sound like AC/DC, but the Cult doing AD/DC is its own thing, and it’s really brilliant I think. The first band I was ever in played ‘Lil’ Devil’ and that’s a pub classic, and if you’re writing pub classics then you’re doing something right I think. ‘Wild Flower’ is definitely the one for me, I love that song. The way the drummer [Les Warner] approaches it... it’s like, you know exactly what’s coming, there’s only one fill in it that’s unexpected and then you listen to it twice and you know when it’s coming. But every time the chord changes, he pushes so that he comes in slightly before the bar. And that’s actually brilliant. That’s how all rock drummers should approach rock drumming. It’s a masterclass."

"On Xbox you could burn CD’s and some in games you could play the music in it, so Boy in Da Corner, Songs in A Minor and Speakerboxx/The Love Below were on my hard drive on my Xbox and would get played in any game that could do it in. So as much as this record is culturally significant, I just always had it on and I can just remember vividly it being a part of my teenage years. I think this track in particular because it’s got Wiley as well has that perfect energy, even if I wasn't from here I could tell that Dizzee is from East. It just feels like London, it just feels grey, someone’s pissed off, I don’t even know why or who’s pushed him too far but that could be anything, you know TfL, someone’s stepped on your trainers, someone’s chose not to sit next to you on the bus, you know, it could be anything. It's so angsty. I love music that can make you feel like that. Not that I’m trying to get people to go and moshpit or anything but music’s powerful. I like being able to tap into those things - you were fine before you came to my show and now you're hyped to do whatever, even to this day if I hear ‘2 Far’ I’m in the mode like ‘What! What! Who wants it!’"

"Somebody gave it to me in the late nineties, just on a blank cassette and then yep, I was completely dubious, because when people mention Miles Davis or jazz in general, I would just think of those crazy funk-jazz things they did in the seventies, and I didn't know he was capable of this incredible orchestral soundscape. It helps that he's reading from an already fantastic piece of music but what he did to it was astonishing again, so I love it. It's just the most evocative record. Recently I had the pleasure of a train journey from Bilbao to Madrid and I put that on my headphones and it was like, "oh yeah, everything is cool". Actually, it didn't [unveil new layers to the record], as I think it was really cool to experience it on the train going through Spain and yet I always think that music is so powerful that the images that you have in your head if you're listening to it in your bedroom are as powerful, if not more so, than if you were in some incredible vista. After that I went back and bought the early Blue Note records, which are generally brilliant. I'm not a real jazz aficionado and if I've put on an old jazz record, it's mostly about mood, because I can't really understand what's going on. Whereas with Sketches Of Spain, it seems more orchestral, where I can understand what's going on better."