"When I was a teenager, I would go to the library, and borrow a lot of albums that I'd read about and that came recommended. Obviously, that's an album that people tend to put in their top 100 records. I just checked it out. I was already into Prince, and I could tell that Prince had been massively influenced by them. Also, the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique was an album I liked a lot as a teenager, and some of the samples from that are from There's A Riot Goin' On. So when I did buy this album, and got it home to listen to it, it was familiar to me somehow because I'd recognise drum breaks from the Beastie Boys or clavinet parts from their records that are sampled, but I could also recognise Prince in the singing style. It's just the grooves on that record, really. There's a very lazy feel to it; there's a combination of drums with a drum machine. It was a very early record to do that. That's something I try and do a lot in my own music, and in Hot Chip."

"Iggy reminds me a lot of me. And it's all in that name; it's all in the title of that album. It’s raw power, you know? I like the funk that David Bowie was able to get behind Iggy. Believe it or not, I first saw an image of Iggy Pop at church, and they were talking about secret messages and backward masking - and they had [a picture of] Iggy Pop looking crazy. I didn't get into it until later, but I think how I was introduced to it was 'I Wanna Be Your Dog'. And what I like about Iggy is it's just genuine raunch. And the album seems like it’s all done in one take. 'Let's do that one, leave it, just try something else'. With his energy on stage, it seems as if the studio was just destroyed after that album - or at least you'd like to believe that. I just read an interview with him in which he said he wrote a lot of it in Hyde Park sitting under a tree wearing pyjama's too, which gave it a cool twist as well. I just love 'Search And Destroy' and 'I Need Somebody' as well."

"I love the production, how they orchestrated those grooves. And Bernard Edwards was a genius bass player, how he came up with that riff that's so often copied. Again, it was just their interpretation of black American funk music. Those guys were supposed to produce the fourth [Gang Of Four] album. And I'd met with him, Bernard Edwards; by the time we'd got to the fourth album, he had died at that point. But I'd met with Nile Rodgers a couple of times, talking about doing a Gang Of Four record. And while that process was going on, Bowie's Let's Dance came out. So not unreasonably they asked for an extra per cent or something, you know, because their stock had just gone up a lot, which I thought was to be expected. But my manager said, ""Oh, we can't do that"", and I feel fairly confident that he was taking a backhander from the people who did do it in the end. I think Hard could have been great. As it was, there were some great songs on that album, but the production doesn't quite get it right."

"This got quite mixed reviews when it came out [in 2012], but I think it's really affecting. The guy had colon cancer, and when this album is great – I don't love all of it, but I love a lot of it – it's like an old man's reckoning. It's full of apologies and remorse, but still the old Bobby Womack is in there. There's still some disdain, but he's also quite sad, as he knows he's at the end of his life. I love how he sings those lines in 'Please Forgive My Heart': ""I'm a liar/I'm in a dream…"" It's a performance miles away from the swagger of an album like The Poet, which was perhaps his greatest ever record, in 1980. I remember he was seen as the godfather of contemporary soul back then – he got an album of the year in the NME around that time too [for 1984's The Poet II]. But on this record, he's this disjointed elder, and he's also someone else. He's standing in this fragmented terrain of 21st century soul music, this great survivor in a sci-fi movie. What a way to approach the end of your life."

"I would’ve been fourteen or fifteen years old and in Wisconsin when I heard this. I was in high school and there was somebody who had some shared interests and liked certain kinds of music. I'd never heard the Ramones before and he said I had to hear them, so he let me borrow his Ramones album. This would’ve been around ‘78 or ‘79 maybe. “That’s the strongest memory I have of putting a needle on an album and hearing something I’d never heard before. It was instant and immediate - 'this sounds so good'. I feel like there’s ‘before I heard the Ramones’ and then ‘after I heard the Ramones’ as a point in time for me, because it was the strongest feeling I ever had of hearing something on an album and within a couple of seconds going ‘'Yes, this is amazing.' “I thought, ‘I’m so late to find out about them’ because they had already been around for three or four years, and ‘Wow, what a shame that I found out about them this late, after they’d been around so long.’ Now, looking back at it, I think I caught them pretty early, so that’s good!"

"This 1990 masterpiece is very much a travel album. It has all the hallmarks and some of the pitfalls of a life on the road: the single 'I Left my wallet in El Segundo' is a case in point. The advice lyric 'I don't eat no ham'n'eggs cuz they're high in cholesterol' in the classic cut 'Ham'n'eggs' is another highly unusual call and response rhyme - but again paints a true picture of the perils of a road life spent in diners. Over the course of the album we visit Lucien in Paris and traverse around the world of music with a zillion samples of classic sixties and seventies rock and soul albums. It's always optimistic and wide eyed - the best way to travel. I was talking to my friend Ben the other day about how this is my favorite Tribe album - (most people seem to prefer The Low End Theory?) - but I learned so much about music through this record - The songs are great and it's one of those albums that drags you into a different universe and world view and changes you for the better."

"I was brought up on this album. It had a poster in it of naked women on bikes which, you know, in certain parts of Europe I think that’s pretty normal, but in England that’s not quite the case and that was super outrageous. We hung it on our wall. Roy Thomas Baker produced that album so there are loads and loads of dynamics. It’s too quiet in bits and then so loud it takes your face off. From when ‘Mustapha’ starts it lets you believe that the album is going to be a certain way and then halfway through that song it completely changes. It keeps you on your toes. I think all their great albums are like that to some degree, but I think that one is the most Queen of the Queen albums. Or at least the most Roy Thomas Baker of the Queen albums. It’s got ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ on it, which is a real favourite. I particularly used to like the more playful Queen tracks, and there’s one called ‘Dreamers Ball’ which sounds like swing music, but instead of the big band being all brassy, it’s just Brian May’s guitars."

"Was it their first album? I don't even know. This and Court And Spark were both records that my parents played when I was young, and I hated. But they didn't play either album that much. My parents are really great but they didn't play them obsessively; they would play favourite songs or pick selections. I listened to this properly when I was maybe 21. It was exciting and dramatic and glamorous. There were these moments, like oboe solos and stuff, that were almost hippy-ish, but they worked so well within the music. I don't know if 'hippy-ish' is the word but I was really into this idea of the instruments going wild and going crazy. An oboe: so cool and weird and a unique combination of timbres. Then, of course, there's the romantic quality of Bryan Ferry's voice, which is why I also love his solo music. And the later Roxy Music, I love also, which everyone thinks is bad but - no, they don't! A lot of people love it. It surprises me that he wrote all the songs on this album. I never knew that."