"Like I said, I think you're only as good as your last creative output, and I think Adore Life is even better than Savages' first album. I got to see them when they were touring this record live last summer as we shared a few festival bills, and they're just phenomenal. Their show absolute punk rock & roll, but dirgey in the way you feel you've drunk too much iowaska, yet you're just at a gig. Their music is hypnotic, it's trance inducing, and Jehnny Beth is just the embodiment of rock & roll, one of the few hopes we have in British music at the moment. What I love is that so many people got behind it, yet it's still such an uncompromising album. It's work to listen to this record, you're not going to put it on and immediately have a good time, and that's important. We need challenging records."

"This one just hits the spot with me. I don't know. I found the first album [Innerspeaker] too derivative of stuff I was familiar with. I loved it, don't get me wrong, and a true test of whether or not I love a record is if I bring it into the studio and try it on the guys, because they are unequivocal in their tastes. So if I take a record in and say listen to this, if one of them doesn't like it, it makes me like it a little less. So I've got to be really sure that a band is great and the guys will love it before I even chance taking it near them. I took the first album in and said, "This sounds like a lot of stuff like you love already." But it's punchy. It's from Australia, and it is amazing."

"My abiding memory really, was spending several months in Ireland in a big country mansion, post-Welcome To The Pleasuredome, and attempting to write songs for the Liverpool album while travelling the world with Frankie and things. We were in the house of the King of Leinster, who'd decided to rent it out to pop groups who needed rehearsal space - I think the Thompson Twins had been there previously - and Paul [Rutherford, Frankie singer], who I think is an even bigger Kate Bush fan than me, brought the album and it never left the turntable. We knew that Julian Mendelsohn, who'd mixed 'Relax' and 'Two Tribes', had been involved in it. It just stayed on the turntable for what seemed like months, over and over and over again. Almost to its detriment in a way. It's just an incredible record. What more you can say?"

"like to think of this as Lennon and Elvis, you know what I mean? Lennon wouldn’t have been there without Elvis and I wouldn’t be here without The Stone Roses. Ian Brown as a frontman had the look and he was cool as fuck. He was my Elvis. The first time I saw them, that was it! I thought, “I want that!” I’d heard our kid play ‘Sally Cinnamon’ round the house and I went to see them just before the album came out and it was like, “This is it, man! This is the next fucking step!” It was like growing up a bit and you’re thinking, “This is the band that’s going to guide me to chicks and being a cool young man.” You know what I mean? This was the album that was going to carry me through. They were my guiding star."

"Mohair Sam' was one of the tracks on it - I recorded it on my first album because of hearing him do it. But I liked him before that - 'Lonely Weekends' was the first one I heard him sing. Heard it on the radio, on the BBC - some people had condemned the BBC because they didn't play enough of this or enough of that but at least you would get a smidgen of things coming through. I'd be getting records then from Spillers in Cardiff, but there was a shop in Pontypridd which was more local, called Freddy Feys, and I would get a lot of stuff in there. On another album later on, I did the song that was on The Many New Sides... called 'Field of Yellow Daisies' that his wife wrote, which I learned later - when I met him, he said “Thanks for recording that.""

"The aural equivalent of a Tom of Finland tattoo, this gayest possible album is dedicated to Truman Capote. With no electronics, prominent guitars or snare drums, its genre is kept vague, so there are sort-of accordion chanties and sort-of disco hits whose lead instrument is yang t'chin (Chinese zither). Released in 1986 only two years after the breakup of Soft Cell, this was Marc's third solo album (fifth if you count Marc & the Mambas), on top of which he was releasing 12" EPs longer than many albums, burning his crimson candle at both ends with, according to his memoir, a £26,000 monthly party habit. The literate lyrics are populated by hustlers, boxers, and Yma Sumac, and set in rundown motels, downtown Barcelona, and "the backrooms where soiled goods are sold." Makes a great gift for a confused teenager, along with some Jean Genet and John Rechy."

"Sorry to pick this. Just saying the title's enough, really, isn't it? I know it's really obvious, but it's such a masterpiece. 

It's been strangely hard picking my albums for this, as lots of things don't resonate with me now like they used to when I was younger. I've been listening a lot more to classical and choral music in the last year, for example, but this fits in with that, because this is sacred music. It's music that transcends genre. Every track is profoundly beautiful – and I say that having liked Talk Talk before this, too. I remember the first album coming out at the same time as Duran Duran's Rio, and people comparing them, then hearing The Colour Of Spring. 'Life's What You Make It' was a big song when I was at sixth form. But this album… this is a bigger thing. I still love it so much.
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