"The reason I’ve chosen the Donna Summer album is not truly because it is a record I’ve played a lot. There is one song on it that changed my career. It’s a song that changed a lot of people’s perceptions of music and it’s, obviously, ‘I Feel Love’. I remember when I first heard ‘I Feel Love’, it sounded alien. I hadn’t heard anything like that before. There wasn’t anything like that before. Somebody had the forethought and the invention to actually come up with something with electronic sequencing that people could dance to. It pulsated in a different way. That person was Giorgio Moroder. I am very grateful to Giorgio Moroder for inventing this way of thinking and for the other records he’s made. I think he is a terrific talent and I loved the work he did on a lot of movie soundtracks, particularly Midnight Express and Cat People. I have all his work. ‘I Feel Love’ was visionary – that’s all I can say about it. The song, along with The Sparks’ album Moroder did [No. 1 In Heaven], was the sort of sound I wanted to make. I was just learning electronic music and how to sequence things. Without a doubt, between Moroder and Kraftwerk, those were the people leading the way – that paved the streets for me. Without ‘I Feel Love’ there wouldn’t be a lot of electronic dance music. That’s the DNA we all used. Moroder, for me, had a period where he was defining the future and it was very unnoticed by a lot of people, perhaps because he was more of a producer than a writer of a lot of songs. As for I Remember Yesterday, it’s a funny album as half of it is electronic and brilliant and the other half is very traditional and is okay. It’s a strange balance but a very important album because of that track."

"My favourite song is 'Farewell, Farewell' which is this beautiful arrangement, awesome songwriting and then Sandy Denny's voice is just so haunting. But that album is masterfully arranged, masterfully recorded and I love the drum sounds. We were always trying to get the drum sounds to be more Fairport - it's so economical but really funky at the same time and they just have a lot of crazy meters that you don't even notice are shifting from 7/8 to 4/4 because it's carried by these strong folk song lyrics and melodies. But that was a big touchstone for us, especially some of the fiddle style parts. I think Richard Thompson is one of the coolest guitarists out there and there's a Richard & Linda Thompson album, I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, the title song of which is featured on this HBO show [Enlightened]. I thought. ""Is this a Liz Phair song from 1993, what is this?"" and then you discover it and think this song's fucking awesome. Her voice is definitely not as good as Sandy Denny's but it's probably more suited for that kind of 70s pop rock. But there's also this really great song on that album called 'The Calvary Cross', which could be a Lungfish song. He's just a dude who was way ahead of his time and more interesting than someone like Jimmy Page, who's been played to death and is such a rip-off artist!"

"I was driving through Iceland listening to this song and it’s just really gorgeous. I think this is how people feel when they take drugs - they begin on this floating cloud and then it becomes a bit chaotic at the end. “It sounds like they were on drugs when they made it, but it doesn’t make me sad when I think about it, there’s something with it, it’s positive without making me vomit, which I really enjoy. Sometimes happier music is hard to listen to, because you can question as to why you aren’t as happy as the people in the song, but I like this song. “I discovered this song much later, after ‘Rez’. When I hear one song I don’t automatically go and find the whole album, I kind of stop and just have fun with that song for months - I get really patient with songs and I can listen to them for months. I saw that ‘Born Slippy’ was on the same album as ‘Rez’ and now of course I have the whole album and I have rave parties for myself, just me. “I also love to listen to this song whilst I paint, when I paint something without meaning. I’m full of opposites or coherent contrasts, one day I like to be at rave parties and then I like to be in forests. I like to see what the world has to offer me.”"

"I was aware of who Black Flag were and I had heard people talking about them. I was in Exeter at a family funeral. I would have been about 14. I nipped out to a record store which was near to where the cathedral where the funeral was and I walked in as a nerdy little dickhead in my suit that I was wearing for the church service. The guy gave me a bit of a look and I asked him if he had anything by Black Flag and he pretty much fell off his chair. I loved that album to death. The beginning to Revenge is still the best start to any song written ever He sold me this album and I kind of knew I was looking for something that sounded like that at that point. It was becoming apparent to me that hardcore was the area of punk that I was particularly interested in. I loved that album to death. The beginning to Revenge is still the best start to any song written ever. I think about Black Flag a lot when I’m writing, in the sense of brevity is the soul of wit. Fix Me is my favourite Black Flag song and it's 42 seconds long. Every time I write a song that is longer than 42 seconds, which is all of my songs, there’s part of me that thinks I’m wasting my time or dawdling."

"It's got to be Trans-Europe Express really. I was aware of Autobahn and that was like The Beach Boys from outer space, engineered by Conny Plank - that was what they called it in those days, it was a blur between engineering and producing. I think Trans-Europe Express consolidated that futuristic thing, and of course it had a namecheck for David Bowie and Iggy Pop in there, which was an endorsement in some way. Although they were German, they were aware of 'our world'. I think the only other German thing I'd heard of before that were Faust, and the reason I know about them was they brought an album out [The Faust Tapes] and it cost about 15p or something, so everyone bought it. 'The Hall Of Mirrors' is really dark! The album's quite song-y as well. With The Man-Machine, it had the perfect record cover, it was the whole red-ness. Futuristic art deco with a slight Hitler Youth edge to it, a sinister edge. I went down to London one time, down the King's Road - I think it was the week of release - and every single shop was playing it. However Man-Machine is everybody's album, whereas Trans-Europe Express is a more private album, which wasn't as widely known. I hadn't taken any drugs at the time, but it affected me. That line, ""Even the greatest stars dislike themselves in the looking glass"", it was all just very atmospheric."

"When we signed our record deal in America, it was a really exciting time and I remember going over there and, at that point, they were basically doing anything to sign us! We went to Interscope Records. We had no money that that point, we were struggling musicians and this woman just opened up this kind of cabinet that was full of every record that Interscope had put out and the one that she chose was Sea Change, saying, “You should listen to this one, it’s only just come out”. And I’d never really been into Beck, I’d just found it sort of contrived but it completely changed my perspective of him. It was just when I met my girlfriend at the time, who’s now my wife. Sea Change is a break-up album but we fell in love to this break-up album, it was the soundtrack to our car journeys at the time. It was really peculiar; normally an album reflects where you are at the time and whenever I hear the songs from it, I’m transported back to this really happy time when we were getting together. That’s what I like about it, because it’s so bare, from what I remember he wrote it just after splitting up from his long-term partner. Trying to convey the misery of such a messy break-up in such a direct way, I was just blown away by that."

"I thought we ought to have one classical album as I do play a lot of classical music at home. I thought about Chopin’s Nocturnes but they didn’t change anything. The Rite Of Spring really was, for me, the first punk album. It was the most uncompromising vision. In the period it was done, no one was doing anything like Stravinsky. He was writing parts for instruments that didn’t have those notes, so they had to have new ones made with extra notes so the orchestra could play that piece. That’s forward thinking. The whole story of the making of the album is so fantastic – that Stravinsky has no money and Coco Chanel comes along and invites him to live at his house and Stravinsky sits in a room alone writing all these parts for all these instruments. It’s extraordinary and a remarkable achievement. Then, the fact that on the opening night in a swishy Parisian theatre the audience hated it. They think it is the most terrible row and now it is acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century. It’s too good a story and I admire his commitment and his inventiveness and his absolute passion to making that record work. You listen to it and think "how did anyone ever do that?" Anyone who hasn’t heard The Rite Of Spring and likes music should really take a listen."