"I heard Nick Drake quite early on, in 1981, when nobody of our generation really knew him. A friend of mine had a big brother who had given him the Fruit Tree box set [first released in 1979]. When I heard it I was all, 'What is this?' Listening to him, I felt like I was going into a world no-one else knew, especially when everyone else was into post-punk. I also found it very sad, as it was the last album he made a few years before he died.

I've got a funny story about it, too. I did one of my first sessions for Manchester Piccadilly Radio in 1981 or so, when Mark Radcliffe was working there. I came down on the bus all the way from Hull, and he was housesitting for someone in the music industry at the time – I can't remember who – but I had nowhere to stay, so I just slept on the floor there. I remember staying up late with Mark going through this music industry guy's record collection, then finding some Nick Drake records and getting really excited. Going, 'Oh, Mark, do you know him?', and Mark going, 'No, who's he? He's great!' He became a big fan."

"Again, her whole catalogue is amazing. I love her music back to front. This is her hit record, as it were, not that it was a proper hit unfortunately. It's been with me for a while and I love it so much. We brought a few pieces of music to listen to while my wife was giving birth to our daughter and this was one of them. That gives an indication of how embedded in my life it is. The tone and mood it sets... She was deep into that sense of spiritual connectedness and universal love. I understand how people who aren't necessarily spiritual might see it as a foolish hippy diversion, but for me, this unlocks the potential of what music can do. At the time it was married to a political agenda, same for all these spiritual free jazz records, and I feel that it's a really unfortunate thing that people don't seem to be able to articulate that so well in the contemporary music world. This is an analysis and that's not why I love it, that's because when I put it on it's my favourite thing to be listening to. But it also stands up to analysis - there's so many reasons to love this music."

"You know, I really get into… I can just throw it out there, because it was a great… it really was really good, but Shut Up, Little Man. It’s a documentary. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s about these two guys that move into an apartment in San Francisco. And their next-door neighbors are the worst neighbors you can possibly imagine. It’s these two older gay gentlemen that have the worst relationship that anyone could ever have. And they spend all hours of the day just screaming at each other. And so these two guys started recording these arguments. I remember in the 1990s, back before the Internet, if you wanted these odd, like, socially passed-around… Remember like Faces of Death? You could get a VHS copy of it? And so this was… You could go to certain independent record stores and they’d have a small collection of these bootlegged cassette tapes of their arguments. And I remember when we were doing Empire Records was the first time I heard these. And it’s the story of the guys that recorded… They track down the two guys that recorded all these things that were passed around through our generation. It’s a pretty amazing documentary. It’s pretty good."

"I love Ghost Box. In a similar way to how British psych from the '60s looked back to a whimsical past and kids' fiction from the Victorian era, Ghost Box look back to a more modern past – specifically the '60s and '70s, which is when I grew up. It's an analogue sound that seems to evoke brutalist architecture, new towns and the like. You can imagine Ghost Box soundtracking a film about a new town built on a burial site. Jim [Jupp] and Julian [House, Ghost Box co-founder] come from Caldicot, which is a really spooky part of Wales. Lots of weird gothic architecture and a lot of weird local folklore and superstition. This record by the Belbury Poly [Jupp] presents someone's version of the past, a vision that's both real and ephemeral. It harks back to a time that wasn't obviously psychedelic but it's not obviously retro. Without being too rose-tinted specs about this record, it has a slight 'warm blanket' effect, while still being a little uncomfortable, if that makes sense. It's possibly a weird record for me to pick in a list of psychedelic records but it definitely does that thing of successfully imagining an alternate reality. I can imagine walking around this place."

"Would Betty Davis have been famous if she hadn't married Miles Davis? Well, is Betty Davis famous? Because it didn't really work; at the time, it put people off, because she was married to Miles Davis - "Oh, she's his missus, she's just bloody flaunting it. I'm not buying a bloody record by her". You can dress it up how you like, be raunchy and using sex to sell it and everything, but it didn't really work. So I think she may have been more successful if she wasn't married to Miles Davis, because it isn't anything like him. Some of her other records are a bit crap, a bit hit and miss in places, but this one reminds me of Grace Jones: it's got a lot of soul, and it gets a really good groove going, and she just does her thing over the top of it. A lot of funk used to give me a headache, but this has a few parallels with Captain Beefheart; it reminds me of Clear Spot-era Beefheart. I knew of Betty Davis at the time, in the 70s, and I completely dismissed her because it gave me a headache, but now I've rediscovered her. And she's brilliant."