"I can't say enough about this album. I heard that when The Stooges came out everyone thought they were retro garage band not realising they were pointing the way forward to punk. Every song on Is This It is amazing. I played 'Modern Age' for my daughter the other day, and just for that song alone it could be one of the greatest albums. I was there for the making of the record and I was so blown away by their dedication to making this perfect music and executing it perfectly every night. It was crazy. These guys would really yell at each other if they missed one chord or beat. They were perfectionists. They were the first band of my age group who were great. There's a level of precision that The Strokes brought to making their music and their approach to it – the way Fab tried to emulate a drum machine in his playing – it feels obvious to people now but it was counter-intuitive at the time, no one had done that. Everything about Is This It was a statement in the opposite direction to what everyone else was doing. Before this the trend was for people make albums that sounded like they were performed in arena, they're soaked with reverb, Is This It is this weird insular record with the distorted vocals. People were confused by the decisions that were made when it was made when it came out, but now you hear it copied infinitely. It's funny that for a band that were criticised for being retro they've now come to define their own times."

"I'm a fan of the album as a concept, but I'm in an album band that never discussed doing anything else and I never sit down and listen to one side on an LP, you know? I'll listen to both sides and that was with me from the beginning. She locked herself away in a cabin with no electricity to make that record. Just her own company and you hear the heartbreak start and end on that record. Genuinely, you know. She really had her heart ripped out and stomped on, and it's so full of love and yearning and adoration and then bitterness and recrimination. And again, it's just a resonant, beautiful thing and it captures a moment in time. And you know, everything from what I consider to be Joni's only swear in a song, she says in the song: 'Woman Of Heart And Mind': ""Drive your bargains/ Push your papers/ Win your medals/ Fuck your strangers/ Don't it leave you on the empty side?"" Can you imagine having that levelled at you? Like a machine gun of character assassination, but she says in the same song, ""You know the times you impress me most/ Are the times when you don't try/ When you don't even try"". It's great – songs, quite often, especially if it's lyric-heavy music, if it relies on the narrative, as Joni's stuff does, the stuff that deals earnestly and honestly with the grey areas, is what knocks me into next week. Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, but of the three she is the best."

"I first heard this record when I was eight or something. I think my mum gave it to me and I listened to it everyday. It replaced The Jackson Five's Dancing Machine that I used to dance to all the time before that. Then I started running home to this Annie album instead. I had so much fun singing along to it and I learnt all the songs. Then I got the leading part in the musical Annie in my school, so it was really the start of my career. I didn't think so much about the lyrics but I knew that my home life was not very happy. I mean, even though I felt very loved by my mother and always had a connection with her, and we have a really similar sense of humour, the song 'Maybe' really connected with me, it was my favourite one to sing. You know: "Maybe my parents could be like this, or maybe they could be like that." My sister always told me I was adopted, which wasn't true but I wished it was because my dad was so mean that I would always be like, "Maybe he's not really my dad". So I really related to that song, imagining actually having a happy childhood. Imagining having parents who were happy and in love and really loved me. I related to that sense of longing but I didn't really know why. I didn't think, "It's because my dad is abusive and drunk"; I didn't think that far ahead, I just sort of intuitively connected to that song."