"Well, I grew up in the sixties. In 1962, I bought the first Rolling Stones single, and I still have it. I still have every single they released, in order, right up until Brian Jones was murdered. I saw Pink Floyd god knows how many times, and even did a couple of light shows for them... We started listening to pirate radio and John Peel’s Perfumed Garden, and had a friend at school called Spidey who was very good at spotting interesting new music. John Peel was the first person to play The Velvet Underground, and Spidey said, “Listen to this, you’re gonna love this!”. That’s when we got the first violin. We used to go to Birmingham, to this tiny little record shop that had nothing of interest except some Albert Ayler and free jazz. There was a record in there, and we recognised the artwork from Oz magazine so we knew it was by Hapshash and The Coloured Coat, because they used to do psychedelic posters and Oz. So we bought it just because of that. It was on Magnet Records. When we pulled out [the disc], we were shocked to see that it was on red vinyl, which we’d never seen before. We later discovered that all these people on the scene in London wanted to raise money for the legals fees of John “Hoppy” Hopkins, the first person who’d been busted for drugs and who co-founded the International Times. He was a real mover and shaker of the times. It’s like twenty to a hundred people high on acid jamming! We fell in love with it and still listen to it all the time. When we DJ, people come up to us and ask, “What was that with that great riff?” Guess what one of them ended up doing? Writing “We Are The Wombles”! That really got me in the head, that was worse than a bad acid trip!"

"He's known in the indie rock subculture as the other half of a band called The Folk Implosion that he was in with Lou Barlow from Sebadoh. They did most of the songs on the Kids soundtrack and their song 'Natural One' was a single in the 90s. John was also a member of the Palace Brothers which was Will Oldham's band from before he became Bonnie "Prince" Billy. So he has a little bit of history collaborating with other great people, but he also made a series of lo-fi home recorded records in the 90s. It is a strange, outsidery folk record. It's psychedelic and a little reminiscent of things like Syd Barrett and Skip Spence's Oar, but it also has this really interesting British folk, Incredible String Band type of 12 string guitar playing. The lyrics are very free associating, somewhat improvised, very intimate and very quiet. His records are so intimate that he broke down a wall between himself and the tape recorded that had never been broken down before. It makes you feel like you're in this tiny little space with him and his singing you this craziest record. I discovered this album at Kim's Underground, a record store in New York. I just bought one of his cassettes off a rack because it looked interesting to me. I'm really lucky I grabbed that tape because Leave Home was the most listen to record of my early teenage years. The style was so inspiring to me growing-up, that all I wanted to do was make John Davis-like songs. A lot of the early Moldy Peaches songs like 'Lucky No.9', 'Lazy Confessions' – all these things on the first album – are me trying to copy John Davis' stuff."

"To Bring You My Love is my favorite PJ Harvey record, I was definitely obsessed with her at that point. She was doing something with the blues that not a lot of artists that I was interested in were doing, sort of making it contemporary. That record had a very natural sound, but it also had a real style to it. It was produced. I still reference To Bring You My Love when we make records. I had really come around to Wire and Talking Heads around this time too, and I started to like that kind of abstract lyrical imagery more than literal story telling. It made it easier to write lyrics, because it was easier to hide behind. At that point, when I was writing lyrics it was all about: What can I sing that won’t embarrass me standing up there onstage? And if you could latch onto something that had a cool meaning to it, that was a bonus. But it wasn’t the primary concern. Sometimes that can lead to a lot of really bad lyrics. And a lot of it is about taste: I didn’t know a lot about what Stephen Malkmus was singing about, but it fucking worked. This is when Spoon’s first album, Telephono, came out, on Matador. In the early ’90s I started noticing that a lot of the records I liked had this Matador logo on the back: Guided by Voices, Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Liz Phair. They were the coolest label. To be able to be in the same company as those people was unreal. So, for a brief time, it was amazing—and then the record came out and nobody cared."

"I thought I don't like it as much as the one I mentioned before, and maybe I still don't, but then once I heard it in the 'phones again, there's something. Then I was listening to that one a lot in the car when I was driving around LA. It just opens your mind. It's undeniable music, untouchable music. Those three people, you just can't really touch them. If you were supposed to pick the greatest musician in the world, I suppose I would have to say John Coltrane. But they're all lumped together because obviously Alice Coltrane does things that John Coltrane can't; same with Pharoah Sanders, it's an extension of John Coltrane. They were put on this planet, they were special beings. I'd appreciated jazz since high school, I played in the jazz band. Then I got some jazz records and enjoyed them, for sure. Growing up, I think the Miles Davis later records hit me first, when I was a late teen, early twenties, Bitches Brew, the classics like Kind Of Blue, and then someone in Boston that I knew turned me on to In A Silent Way, which I really like, it had that Fender Rhodes on it and Chick Corea. But then I read the Miles Davis autobiography, circa 2004: that's like a lesson in jazz in a way, in his cocky way; he saw it all. I remember when I was in Boston, I bought this Thelonius Monk record, Underground, and there's a scatty song on there called 'In Walked Bud' and that always blew my mind. I got heavy back into jazz, and then back into Coltrane circa 2005, 06, 07, I just had some resurgence recently."

"What a great songwriter and lyricist Shane MacGowan is. It’s funny as last night I was going through some of these again to listen to them, as they’re maybe records I hadn’t listened to for a while. Rum Sodomy & The Lash is one I hadn’t played for a while, but I knew it was one I’d played to death at different points in my life, so I thought “I’ll go back and listen to that again, I wonder if it does hold up”. There are other records that I thought would make the list that didn’t make it, that I still thought were good and I can appreciate why I loved them when I was 16, like Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables, which I still think is a great record, but there’s something that makes Shane MacGowan one of the greats of the century, like 'The Old Main Drag' – you don’t know when it’s written, like 1912 or 1982, you know? Very few people can write songs like that. Music that is specifically about place and characters yet it seems timeless. To pull that off is astonishing. Also they saved folk music from the twats; unfortunately they seem to have reclaimed it in recent years. Suddenly folk music became violent and soaked in whiskey again as it should be! In a way that the Irish community in London are neither Irish nor London, they’re just their own thing; The Pogues were neither punk nor folk. Shane McGowan’s delivery – he can take a song like Ewan McColl’s 'Dirty Old Town' or 'A Pair Of Brown Eyes' or 'The Band Played Waltzing Matilda' and give them a poignancy or life or meaning, or a dirt and raw-bloodied abrasiveness which most performers could never bring to a place like that."