"Even just thinking about this song, I can feel the beginning of tears in the backs of my eyes. It's such an astonishing piece of lyric writing. It's like that Linton Kwesi Johnson track - the narrator of the song, and their emotions, are so believable. Both songs are about letters, funnily enough. “The imagery is so gentle but it's still significant and it's recognisable of a different world; just the idea of a typing pool now is absurd - it's something that belongs to a different decade. And then the imagery of the paper and the ink drying and there's a confession, but we don't know what the truth is. She's talking about telling the truth in this letter she's written, but we don't know whether she's confessing to something she's done or to the way she truly feels. “Either way, it's definitely a story about the end. 99.999% of people who've loved in their lives will know how that feels, what it's like when love ends and this is one of those songs that just gently captures the hugeness of that kind of situation. It's sung and worded very softly, but what it's describing is incomprehensibly massive. It's communicated with that image of the page being wiped clean, while the landscape remains unchanged. Absolutely astonishing. “Trish Keenan’s death is a story of tragedy in itself, because she was so unique. I know you shouldn't try to relate the personal story of the performer to the piece of music, or the writing, or the play, but you can't help but do it in this case because so many Broadcast songs are in that vein. When you communicate emotion in a song the reason it works is because, as a listener, you recognise something you've experienced before, and so Trish's writing doesn't just remind you of loss - it reminds you of the loss of her.”"

"When I was about ten, I was given The Compact King Crimson on cassette tape and that’s what led me to “21st Century Schizoid Man.” This song is from In the Court of the Crimson King, which has the screaming face on the cover, and the face is inspired by the Arthur Janov book The Primal Scream. Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis. “My Dad told me that at the time of the book and album there was a real fad for going out into nature and screaming guttural sounds. It became this zeitgeist self-help technique and I believe that’s what influenced the book, but essentially, it’s a guy having an existential meltdown and the song taps into that. “I think because I was young when I heard it, I didn’t appreciate this more complex meaning, and at the time I just appreciated the sheer aggression of the music. It was also the first time I’d ever heard those complicated time signatures and polyrhythms, as well as the combination of distorted guitar and saxophone. ""I hadn’t grown up on jazz, so I sort of thought it was for nerds, but when I heard this and heard the sax on the time signatures I was like ‘This is like jazz rock’. In the Court of the Crimson King is hailed by lots of people - like Shellac - as the first Math Rock or Post Rock record. They also invented heavy metal if you think about it, because they were doing riffs before Black Sabbath. “Our first album, Making Dens, is heavily indebted to King Crimson. We very much wore our influences on our sleeve in the beginning, and we had this approach of throwing everything including the kitchen sink at our songwriting. Whenever I listen to Making Dens, I hear the chaos of a band trying to sound like King Crimson. They’ve been a big influence for Mystery Jets."

"Actually you'll hear that a lot of my choices, I realise, are to do with singing and people whose singing styles just so engaged me. I was walking past a kebab shop in North London and I heard this song, and this singer just made my stomach go funny. So I went into the shop and said, ""What are you playing?"" and what he was playing was one of those CDs with about a thousand MP3s on them. I asked him what track it was and he didn't know. I thought, ""I must find this singer"", so I said, ""Can I buy the record from you?"" He didn't want to sell it, you see, because it was the only music they had in the shop. So I gave him £55 for it. He saw a sucker [laughs]. So I got this CD and I went through track after track after track, and I finally find the song, but of course there were no names or anything because it was just a burnt CD. So I went back into the shop with one of my ghetto blasters and said, ""Okay, this is the song, what is it?"" He didn't know so I asked him if he knew anyone that would know so he said, ""Well, I'll ring my dad."" So I'm holding it up to the phone and his dad is down the other end and he says, ""Oh well that's Belkis Akkale, obviously."" She's singing here on the last track of this album ('Ötüşün Kuşlar') by a songwriter called Arif Sag. There's three great singers on this track and Belkis Akkale comes first. It's very interesting hearing the difference between their three voices. It's like a glossary of contemporary Turkish singing. Her voice is the one that does it for me. The other two don't have the erotic wobble that she has."

"""When VU came out in 1985, everyone I knew had absorbed the official Velvets albums from the late 60s and early 70s, and had listened to all the bootlegs they could get their hands on. We had heard in the press mention of lost recordings and there were a couple of those songs on bootlegs that were hard to get. So, when this album came out it was like finding The Commandments 11 to 20. I almost didn't want to get my hopes up too much as it promised amazing things. When I did get it, I couldn't believe how good it was. It has a particularly important part in my life, in that The Smiths were already going at that point and we were a successful band. To be hit by something as a fan of music when you are already number one in the album charts yourself - I think Meat Is Murder had just come out at that point - was an utterly brilliant thing. It dropped into my life like a ton of inspiration. I was obsessed with it and, in particular, the versions of 'I Can't Stand It' and 'Foggy Notion'. I couldn't understand why that version of 'Ocean' hadn't come out before as it was easily the best one. I played 'I Can't Stand It' so many times that it stuck in my subconscious and that came out as the inspiration for the rhythm part on the song 'The Queen Is Dead'. So, the VU album was what I was listening to almost exclusively before I started writing the album The Queen Is Dead. The earlier Velvets albums are so revered that to better them is quite a feat. I have been in many an argument with people who think I am insane for preferring this record. When you take away the reverence for the early albums - which are undeniably incredibly important - VU is my favourite listen."""

"There’s something very quirky about the two records Brian Eno made just after he left Roxy Music. They feel naturally 'him’, in a way, like he didn’t really think about it too much. He did it very quickly, in a sort of 'of-the-time’ kind of way, and those records really brought out his character more than any other music he’s done over the years, even including his ambient stuff – I think he thinks about all that ambient stuff too much, in a way. The earlier records feel like they were done with humour and fun. Obviously there’s a big cash incentive if you’re asked to produce Coldplay or U2, they’re difficult things to turn down if you’re any producer. But I think it’s been debilitating for him, he should just be more experimental. [But] I do hear a lot of good stories about his approach and the way he coaxes the best out of people as a producer. There was a bit of a connection between him and Depeche Mode – he did some remixes for 'I Feel You', which were called the Swamp mixes, and they’re typical Eno. They sound exactly like the kind of thing you’d expect him to do, and I loved them. And I thought they were great. There was a connection because Flood had worked with on the U2 records, and they’d hired a house and built a studio there, and all lived together to make a record. I said 'That’s a great idea, let’s do the same thing’. And it was a total disaster. We lived together and recorded together, and of course, it was one of the most uncreative recording sessions… actually, it wasn’t really – it was one of the most difficult recording sessions we’ve ever had. We were all living in this house and nothing was getting done, and yet, when I look back and see what we produced over a very long period of ten weeks, we recorded three of the best Mode tracks ever."

"Nebraska is different from all the other Bruce Springsteen albums because it's not very bombastic! It's just acoustic guitar on a four-track machine. It's got to be the most lo-fi record you could get from Bruce Springsteen. I believe that's because he made demos for the E Street Band, and just didn't like how they sounded when they were played with the band. His producers, and I think one of his bandmates said to him, "The demos sound better". When I first heard it, I think that I only knew Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie in terms of that type of sound - someone working with a harmonica and an acoustic guitar. He's writing about the working classes of America, or people who are failing in their lives or trying to make it but failing. It's darker than other records too though. I think he's taking inspiration from stories he's read in the newspaper about criminals who are serving life sentences or those who are going to the electric chair. At the same time, it's about families, brothers and someone's father who is no long alive. It's got a lot of humanity in it as a record, with this resonating and wonderful sound - daunting vocals and very haunting harmonica parts. There are also loads of reverbs and a glockenspiel is on there too. It's a murky-sounding record at first, but the more you listen to it, you find all of these other details. I was at school when I first heard it. I couldn't think of an obvious way that Bruce has influenced me, until I wrote a song called 'Elvis Has Left The Building' which is on my new album. I just thought that the kind of song it was, and the mood, reminded me of 'Streets Of Philadelphia' or 'Nebraska' - not in an obvious way, and I didn't think of him in order to write it, but it reminded me of that in an odd way."

"""This would've been in my top five for sure - it's a big, big record for me. It's incredible on so many levels. If you want a record that illustrates what music can do in a very different sense, this is it. It's progressive and weird, but it shows you can make a concept album that isn't awful. I grew up in this little town called Dundas in Ontario - actually, I lived outside it, but all my friends lived in town. And this record is like a mythical record in Dundas, because one of my friends found a copy of it in the middle of the road - just lying there - and he brought it home. I wasn't doing any drugs at that point, but it was around that time my friends were smoking weed and doing mushrooms and whatever, so finding a beat-up copy of this record and putting it on it was like: ""HOLY SHIT!!!"" I still can't really listen to that track that's just an infinity symbol - I find it uncomfortable. And then there's 'The Four Horsemen' - that's like the Dundas theme as far as I'm concerned. It captures something of the eccentric spirit of this weird place that I grew up in. At the time that I found out about this record, the only reason I knew about Vangelis was because of the Chariots Of Fire theme, which was pretty terrible or definitely naff. But I love introducing people to this record because it's so far away from what they think Vangelis or Demis Roussos would do, even if you know the Blade Runner soundtrack. It's so far removed from anything that either of those guys was involved in. The music on there is so diverse; each track is completely different. Leading up to the release of the new album I was doing a DJ mix, and because of doing this feature there are now two tracks from this record on that mix! I'd forgotten how fucking good all these tracks are."""