"There's a lot of personality to this album. A lot of really funny, sly lyrics. Slyly dirty lyrics. I didn't know Prince Buster whatsoever but a guy I did an interview with in Australia gave me a CDR, it was back when you shared CDRs, and this CDR had a bunch of albums on it, including the first Deerhunter record I ever heard and then this album. I kind of didn't think that any of this music would be good but I imported it anyway and I just started listening and then slowly every now and then something would reveal itself and this was one of the two that really had a huge impact. It's a fun and funny record. It's not heavy but it's very cool. "

"If somebody asked me at the time of this release 'What's it's like on the streets of New York?' I would just put on this Mobb Deep album and tell them to listen to it in its entirety. This album is Queens and it's representative of a whole part of New York City. There's a lot of anger in here – parts of it make you want to punch somebody in the face – but there's also a lot of classic club bangers in there too that just rock. It's a record of opposites and they were really a band all about opposites and differences. They were probably one of the last really different bands of that era who were just great. They always played such banging music."

"Niggaz4Life is just… both the De La Soul albums had a cinematic quality to them, you can see those songs. With that being said, [on this album] Dr Dre had this sonic brilliance and pristine gangster music that just sounded brilliant. And it was orchestrated and sequenced very brilliantly, too. It seems like an awful lot of thought went into it. To me, it wasn't Gangsta with an 'a', it was Gangster with an 'er' - with a suit and tie. This is the business gangster; this isn't hold your gun sideways, this is Scorcese. Ice Cube not being there for this album was part of the appeal; everyone wanted to know what they'd be able to achieve without him. And it's a triumph."

"This was when Madness were out of action, and ecstasy was in the air, I was checking out this and checking out that, and I remember hearing ‘Loaded’ in a supermarket in Kilburn High Road and I said “Fuck, what’s this coming through the speakers?” But I was reminded of it because I saw Primal Scream at Glastonbury this year, doing the whole album, and it just reminded me what a fucking great album it was. ‘Higher Than The Sun’, I think, was their masterpiece. I don’t think anyone got it better, that ethereal space between rock and dance music, than them with Andy Weatherall. I thought Happy Mondays were great, and The Stone Roses, but I thought Screamadelica was really sensational."

"Delia Smith baked the cake for the front cover of this album. I guess I could have got Yotam Ottolenghi to make me a meringue for the front cover of The High Flying Birds or got Heston Blumenthal to make me some barbed wire ice cream for it. I could have gone for Their Satanic Majesties Request, it’s got ‘2,000 Light Years From Home’ and ‘She’s A Rainbow’ on it. And again for years I just had the Rolled Gold best of but this was the first album I heard by them when I really thought, 'Oh yeah… this is what it’s about… they’re not just ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’.' ‘Gimme Shelter’ and ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, that’s more like it."

"If you want to persuade people to give Frank Zappa a second go, you play them 'Trouble Every Day', it's one of the greatest songs ever, and it sounds like it could have been off one of the first two Velvet Underground albums. Again this is an album that Mark Smith played me. Just the other day I played 'Concentration Moon' in which he's having a go at the VU. He hated everyone, the Velvet Underground, the beatniks, the hippies… it was a landmark album because it was the end of hippie culture. People say it was after the stabbing at Altamont but musically this was it. It has the Beatles referenced in the pastiche on the cover. It's really fabulous, really cynical."

"I stole that from my brother. I was like, ‘What is this?’ I was in seventh grade or eighth grade and it was another album where it kind of takes you somewhere. You are like, This isn’t human. This was just dropped by a spaceship and it’s not a person singing this song or creating these beats. This is just a space alien.’ Portishead’s production is just insane beats you would expect to be on a KRS-One album. But then there's this little white girl with an angel voice singing over it. It was a cool juxtaposition. I like ‘It’s A Fire.’ That’s a chill song with kind of a military drum thing going on, like a drummer boy."

"This is the album with 'Brown Shoes Don't Make It'. What colour shoes are you wearing? Black? Phew. It was the absurdity that I liked in Frank Zappa - this album also had 'Call Any Vegetable'. It was stuff that just didn't make any sense, but they played so well they must know what they're talking about. That was why I liked Soft Machine as well: "Hope for happiness! Happiness! Happiness!" What? I never knew what it was. And that was like The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Arthur Brown, too. Unpredictability is what I like most in rock bands. But only when it's done well. Like with The Who - they had great pop songs, and then they had 'Boris The Spider'."