"I found a very interesting thing out about Tony Allen. I was thinking, ""How did he get to that music?"" In my opinion, Afrobeat really grew out of his drumming more than anything else. I mean, Fela was of course totally important to it and realised what you could build around that, but I think there was nothing else you could find that sounds like Tony at that time. So I was asking a friend of mine about this, Joe Boyd, the record producer, and he said that the story with Tony was that he was the only subscriber to Downbeat magazine in West Africa when he was about 18 or 19. In one edition there was a supplement by Max Roach, the jazz drummer, about hi-hat technique and Tony got completely fascinated by this article about how you balance the hi-hat with the rest of the kit. So Tony came from the history of Nigerian drumming and then he saw this article by Max Roach and that was the sort of thing that galvanised him really. Afrodisiac has four songs and they're all absolutely brilliant. There's no disappointment on the album at all. On later records there's quite a lot of fat, the pieces go on and on and sometimes they're a bit aimless, but Afrodisiac I suppose was being made as an attempt to push Fela over here, so instead of a piece taking a whole side it takes only half a side. I used to go to this record shop just off Tottenham Court Road called Sterns and that was a place where you could buy records from other countries, so a lot of Africans went there because you could buy West African records there. I used to sniff around there as I was just fascinated by all the covers. All these people with amazing headdresses on and you think, ""Christ, I really want to hear that record, I wonder what that sounds like."" So I saw that cover and bought it entirely on that. I thought, that sounds good, it's got the cheesiest title you could have. I took it home and just thought, fuck, the vigour of it and the Nigerian strength [laughs], the rudeness of it. The horns, when I heard them, I had this picture of these huge trucks on the Trans-African Highway and they have these enormous compressed air horns and that is what the horns on the record sounded like to me. They were so un-glamourised. They didn't have that kind of 'jazzy' soft, smoochy sound, they were just ""fucking get out of my fucking way!"" When I first met Talking Heads, the first meeting I ever had with them, they had been playing in London and they came over to my flat to talk about me working on their next album. So I said, ""This is the future of music"", and I played them Afrodisiac, and to their credit they were incredibly impressed by it. If you listen to the third album we did together (Remain In Light) it's so influenced by that. It's sort of shameful in a way."

""I chose this one because it has 'War Pigs'. It's quintessentially Sabbath even now. They have to play those songs because they are the ones that say everything about that band. Tony [Iommi, guitarist] has said that they were in and out in a few hours when they were making those first records, and this was a pretty quick follow-up. He's a riff master. It's just riffs. It's the essence and the purity of Sabbath that I love, and on this record they really nail it. If somebody were to ask me about Sabbath, what they represent and what they've done, I'd tell them to just go and listen to this record because it encapsulates them so well. They were a Birmingham band too and I think it just shows that a lot of bands from that Midlands region were very prolific. There was a lot of activity going on in and around the Birmingham area. I've always said that the Beatles were responsible for breaking the wall around London down, because before them there was this idea that you had to be from London to be successful. But them being from Liverpool and then later bands like Sabbath from Birmingham sent a message that it wasn't the case and I think that's great. The way that the scene was in Birmingham at that time, we had a fabulous club called Mothers where everybody played. I saw everyone play there: Cream, Sabbath, Pink Floyd. It made Birmingham a real hotbed outside of London for that style of music. We were friends with Sabbath, and I've always considered them to be the inventors of the heavy metal sound. We knew each other and for them to suddenly have this massive impact with this record and be on the radio and in the NME was thrilling. It was before the internet so it took time to get the word out but that made it more exciting to watch for me. When they went to America we were in awe of them because everyone wanted to go to America. Of course we did a few years later, but that was only because of this heavy metal sound that they were responsible for."

"I was involved with Homelife, but I was more of a session musician in a way as I wasn't involved in the writing of the music; I don't see it as my band. The core of the band was Paddy Steer and Tony Burnside, who'd both been in Yargo, and a musician called Simon King who was from London and had been in many bands. Computers had just reached that phase where you could do proper recordings on them. It wasn't Pro-Tools but you could do decent hard drive recordings. It was an interesting mix of people of varying age groups and genders, which made it very rich. There was a singer called Seaming To who'd appeared on records by Mr Scruff and she had this incredible octave range, and I played bass clarinet. It was like a digital orchestra and it felt a bit like Sly And The Family Stone and it crossed the jazz line as well. The whole album has the feel of some Mediterranean place that doesn't exist, and place to wallow in; it's very languid. It's Impressionist music that came from a terraced house in Manchester!"

"I think that tune is such a perfectly crafted piece of music. The funny thing is there's two mixes. There's the Jamaican mix, and the Jamaican mix is tough but I do like the other mix too. I got to work with Tony Platt who was like the engineer at a lot of those sessions and he was telling me all sorts of stories. And then what the song was about, when he was living in London and he was hanging around in Soho. It makes so much sense now because when I was really playing this a lot was when I was spending a lot of time in Soho, going to Ronnie Scott's, learning my craft, learning to play drums and jazz, going to clubs, hanging out ‘til 4am. So I felt it, I could picture him being there like ‘Rahtid…’ Everyone's been out on the night bus and seen something and think did that just happen? So I've always had an affinity with that particular track, sonically and content wise. I think people don't often talk about that side of Bob, and they’ve made him out to be this ganja-smoking, peace-loving guy, that’s not really what he's about. He's very political and does a lot of social commentary."