"How I got to know about it was through knowing their original record label Kitty-Yo and working with people in Berlin and going over there, and then I met Ronald, and this album summed up a moment for me. Dance music had so completely dominated the 90s. Really you could only ever talk about music in terms of the beat. There was techno and electro and then there was drum & bass, and they were so dominant; there was no other music. I remember thinking at the time, at the height of drum & bass, why would you listen to any other kind of music besides drum & bass? That's the only kind of music there is. There's Britpop, but that's rubbish. And then towards the end of the 90s all that started to fade and there was Tortoise suddenly appearing with what Americans who didn't do dance music did as instrumental music. And then from Germany you had To Rococo Rot. I think they gave me that record, because I think the version I've got is a promo. And again it's one of those records we just listen to over and over again. Wire did a tour, I think it was in 2000, and when we started we hadn't provided any music to go on before the band. And in every venue they were playing something like Soundgarden. Sorry, but I can't stand Soundgarden. I can't take it. So then we said well why don't we give them some music to put on? And I had that album, so we had that on before every show and it was really good. It was like you have some thrashy support band and then some thrashy dirge playing after that and then Wire coming on and it's like an evening of dirge. So to lighten it up we put something else on that puts the audience in a different space. And it also set us up in a different way. We got to feel differently about what we were doing. It was very effective for that"

"Of all the records I've chosen here, they all changed my life in some way but the one that had the most profound impact on me was Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. This just blew me away because it was one of those moments in my life where I was like 'How do you do this?' Some of the other records I'd listened to at the time, I'd managed to figure out how they'd done stuff, how they made a certain sound. As a musician, when somebody comes along and does something that you never thought of, that you didn't know was humanly possible and it just twists fucking everything you thought was possible up in your brain, that's a big fucking impact. That was the impact of Public Enemy to me. My first thought was: 'I need to figure this shit out. What the fuck is this?' I was just a kid listening to this but I just didn't know what they were doing and I was hungry to know. I was a Public Enemy fan from the very first album. When this album came out in 1988, it revolutionised sound and music: it was like a fucking tsunami of sound coming at you. Everything about them was brand new and different and I just listened to them as a nineteen-year-old kid with my mouth open thinking: 'What the fuck?' Public Enemy were probably the pinnacle of music production and the best band in the world at that time. They were easily one of the best production teams in the world in any genre of music back then. Like so many of the records I'm picking, this was like a genre changing historical landmark piece; it wasn't just a record that was put out – this was a record changing the culture and the way that people explored music. They were always a voice for the dispossessed, but they never ever felt preachy with it, which I liked so much."

"This is from Rock 'n' Roll Animal, which I don’t listen to anymore and haven’t for years. I prefer to listen to - and really enjoy - other versions of ‘Sweet Jane’ much more. This has the big dual-electric guitar thing going on, and a long intro before he comes onstage. You can hear the audience respond after it’s gone on for several minutes and gone through all this sort of classic rock sounding stuff, which I liked a little bit when I first heard it, but now it doesn’t really speak to me. I’m remembering it because he’s coming onstage and the way he starts singing. I think this was first album that I had, or got out of a library, that I was able to listen to a bunch of times. I listened to it a lot of times and I really liked the song. Shortly after that, the brother I stayed with in New York City, who took me to the Johnny Thunders show, had actually been at the concert that they recorded Lou Reed’s Rock 'n' Roll Animal. He and friends were there, they were way in the back. They did two shows, two sets, with two audiences. For the next one they didn’t have all the seats filled in the front, so my brother and his friends got invited to be up front for the second show, so one of those crowd people screaming or yelling could have been him. He was there at the show and that was a little extra or bonus I found out after the fact. Speaking of that, it’s possible that I got a lot of stuff out of a library and kept checking things out, he would give me some albums for Christmas or a birthday, so it’s possible that that one came from him as well - which sort of makes sense if he was there at that concert!"

"My whole thing has gone playlist now, so I'll have this on my headphones now as I walk around because sitting down to listen to two sides of vinyl is less frequent in my life. But certainly when I bought Live Evil, it was the only record that I played for months! And quite deeply so. A friend had lent me an album on CBS, which had an inner sleeve and on this inner sleeve would be descriptions of other records. And on one of them was a journalist wordily describing this as something like, ""… an exploration of a sonic journey"", and that really set my imagination off. And the cover of Live Evil is fantastic. It just looked like a fascinating object, and it was a double album as well. It was a high-risk purchase. But playing this record, it was like, ""Wow! What is this amazing, glowing world?"" And it had these Hermeto Pacoal tracks on it that are really ambient – 'Nem Un Talvez' is one and 'Little Church' is the other – and those tracks really got me. Back then there was no particular place to start listening with what would become ambient music. There were pieces that were beatless but these were deeply coloured and were way before Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze records, which we didn't have much patience for. But there's so much bursting out of this record. Most of it is recorded live and the fact that John McLaughlin was on it really makes it for me, and he's just an amazing artist and guitarist. On this record, he's free as a bird and it's just mental. He just lights up this record. [Keyboardist] Keith Jarrett's on it, and he's a particularly complicated improviser. I jumped into that world and the ripples from diving into that pond, I just follow them. All the people that played on that record came out of Miles Davis' world."