"It’s funny, this list, I’ve actually met a lot of the people I’ve chosen! Rufus came on tour with us in 2003, it was the first time we’d got on a tour bus and the first iPods had come out. Tim had an iPod, and I checked it out, I put it on and the album he had on there was Want One and I was completely blown away. He sounds a bit like Radiohead-does-classical, particularly on that record. I remember saying to him that he sounds a lot like Radiohead and he was a bit like, “Really?”, I don’t think he even knew their music. That album was written, I think, during the time he got clean from being really addicted to crystal meth. I mean it sent him blind and stuff, it was really serious. So the album tells that story, with just beautiful songwriting, and I don’t know if he ever got close to that album again in terms of song-writing, it’s such a phenomenal record. And I like orchestral arrangements if they’re done well, or else it can sound like Il Divo or something but he did it so well, mixing pop and classical."

"It was hard to pick a Cure album because they're one of my favourite bands, and one of the bands that has made brilliant albums in very different styles, perfect pop albums. Pornography is a pretty unique record that is just insanely bleak, so hopeless but also really again self-contained and perfect. It's not got a shit song on it, even some of my favourite albums have a song that you can imagine they could have done without, but Pornography is absolutely brilliant in that respect. It's just a really suffocating, druggy, bleak amazing record. I hear there was a lot of drinking… I've never really been party to any studio meltdowns, so these stories are… I mean, maybe I'll have a couple of slices of cake too many. They're always quite fascinating. I was definitely a bit of a goth, and still am at heart, I just have no hair to dye black any more. The Cure were the first band that I got properly into. The Disintegration tour was the first gig I ever saw, when I was 14 or 15 or something. We toured with the Cure, they were great to tour with. There was a party every night, they treated all the bands really well."

"When I was making this list, I kept questioning why I was choosing individual records. There are [other] records that influenced me as a kid but in this moment, when asked for this specific list, I was on tour and we were driving around America in a van, just the four of us in the band, the core of the Babelsberg record, the three musicians: Steve Black, Osian Gwynedd and Kliph Scurlock. Kliph has got a real high-resolution digital file player so he made a playlist that lasted a month. There were certain records we returned to as a group that chimed with us during these particular moments and one of them was this record. I like that Davis has dismissed the trumpet and taken up a synth instead - it's a good example of how to grow old radically rather than mellow out and it informed our tour so, if in doubt, we'd refer to this record live. It makes an interesting case for what works on a high-resolution file or what needs high-resolution [to sound as it should]. I might recommend this record now but if someone listens to it on Spotify, half of the quality of the performance might be shut out due to the frequencies [lost in encoding]."