"I love this record. Of course Bob Dylan is a genius, and most of the acknowledgements of Dylan are for his compositions. These tracks, many of them I think are traditional songs, there's one or two originals. I love listening to this all the way through. His extraordinary rendition of 'The House Of The Rising Sun' is somehow overlooked. It amazes me. I know the Animals' one is brilliant, but I prefer the Dylan one, because it just tears your heart open. You really get a strong sense of the meaning of the lyric when Dylan does it, the melancholy of it. I think the reason why I love it is, you get the sense of the beginning of something. You know, this guy's gonna have a future. The simplicity of it, as well. It's just this guy with a harmonica and a guitar, yet it's profound. And I think credit has to be given to [producer] John Hammond as well, who's one of my great heroes. What a guy. A champion of African American music, yet at the same time, a champion of bringing white music and black music together. That to me is the message of the last century, more than anything. It's not separating the two, it's what they did together. You wouldn't have a job, and probably I wouldn't [laughs], without that marriage, because rock music wouldn't have happened without it, it wouldn't even exist."

"Lyrically Dizzee Rascal is phenomenal, and musically he's one of the most progressive, forward thinking grime artists and musicians of our time. He won the Mercury Prize over ten years [before Skepta], which says it all. This record was what I listened to when I was commuting to and from Slough, when I was just starting Gallows, I was listening to it nonstop. I've loved grime since I was young, I've always loved hip hop but grime was so quintessentially British, you couldn't have made it anywhere else. To me grime is punk, more now than ever. Punk to me was the sound of disenfranchised youth, and that's what grime is. You take everything away from young people and tell them what they can't do, at some point they're going to say 'yes we can', and that's what's happening now. They feel discriminated against and now they're making the right fucking decisions by showing that. I think it's a classic record. What's really nice to see is that back when this arrived on the scene it was still very much about beef in the grime scene, people were still writing diss tracks, whereas what's happened recently is that when he played those tenth anniversary shows you just see everybody celebrating it, celebrating the fact that here's an album that did so much over a decade ago, and now we've just had a second [grime Mercury Prize winner]. I love that, but my problem is that there haven't been more. I love that these are being used as bookmarkers, as milestones, but we need a lot more than that, more progressive, forward thinking, unique individuals. That's what the Mercury Prize is supposed to be for, though it misses more than it hits."

"I think these albums [by Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke] essentially let me know what I was supposed to do in life. I would read Jaco's autobiography, I wanted to learn everything about the man, and I would go find the other albums that he worked on. Everybody knows him as the actual virtuoso bassist that planted the seed, but I wanted to know what made him tick, what got him to the point of being who he was. That's what Jaco Pastorius did to me; it made me want to know him as a person. I would study, I would transcribe, I'd listen, imitate and mimic everything. As you go through different phases, somebody may even go so far as to say 'you sound like this person'. I mean, you gotta be okay with those moments, because it's leading to something. If you're keen on the instrument, it's always leading to something else. Every time I listen to the self-titled album I feel weightless. I feel like it's going between 10-year-old me and 35-year-old me. It almost feels like I've never heard it before, and I get the same emotions every time I hear it. It's one of the only ways I know I'm moving forward is by hearing this album all the time. It's crazy, it feels weird, but it's the truth. It's like a reset button in my life, listening to this album. By the time I get to the end of Jaco's album, I just remember how much and how hard guys like him used to work. It also reminds me to keep going, and it also reminds me where I came from."