"It’s a record that always puts me in a good mood whenever I play it. Loved The Kinks when I was a kid and I learnt how to play guitar by learning from a Kinks songbook. I think if you are learning to play acoustic guitar, then The Kinks are a great place to start. Ray Davies makes the songs sound deceptively simple. There’s elements that are coming from blues or music hall or whatever, but he tends to modulate the chord progressions in really weird, unpredictable ways that are so fresh on the ears when you hear them even now all these years later you think, ""How did you come up with that?"", but at the same time they also had these pure pop melodies over the top as well. He didn’t sound like he was a smart-arse, he sounds like he has a very lateral imagination and also quite unconsidered as well in the way he must have written those songs. You can imagine him sitting there thinking, “I’m going to try this one now”. You can explain it in terms of music theory and it would sound complex, but he was “Why don’t I try this?” Dave Davies is also a total star of this record: there’s a couple of really good songs like 'Death Of A Clown' is on this record too. 'Waterloo Sunset' is on here, as is 'David Watts' and so you have those classic Ray Davies songs about social observation, but my favourite song on the album is 'Two Sisters', and it’s about two sisters, one who has this mundane life who is jealous of the other one who has this carefree existence, and I might be reading too much into it but I sometimes wonder if it was ""Raymond looking in his washing machine"". I don’t know these guys, but I get the sense that Dave was a bit wild and Ray had a family at that time, and that the two sisters were in fact two brothers. It also has this heartbreaking melancholia running through it which I think The Kinks capture so well, like very few bands can. It’s saturated with a sweet melancholia, and I think that song captures it."

"The Painted Ship are a psychedelic garage band from Vancouver. My favourite kind of garage is not so much straight ahead, riff driven garage, but warped and atmospheric garage – that’s what I love to listen to. “Like a complete loser, I’ve made a playlist on my iTunes called ‘Mood Garage.’ They’re the kind of songs that are perfect for when you’re in the car late at night. It was Rhys Webb from The Horrors who first played me this song a couple of years ago, I told him about my ‘Mood Garage’ playlist and this specific sound and he suggested ‘Frustration’ and it was totally right. “Garage is an amazing genre. The name comes from kids at home making music with only the means available, but then you’ve got all these weird records that came out of it and went in another direction. It’s like it becomes more than the sum of its parts, it has something unearthly about it that you can’t pin down. It’s sort of like a darker version of the ‘Setsunai’ bittersweet feeling. It still hits you in the same place, but it brings you down another path. “Artistically, garage music has impacted me because of how instinctive the genre is. When it comes to music that actually inspires me to want to make things, it’s always music that is a little more instinctive and spontaneous. I remember when I read Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds, this whole history of Post-punk that made me want to start like, four different bands. When you read about people who are making music with simple means, it feels spontaneous and it makes you want to play. “When The Horrors first started there wasn’t any discussion or question of anything, we didn’t even know how to be in a band. So it was all instinctive, a raw transmission of emotion and expression. And that’s why I love garage – it’s through this raw expression that a whole movement of kids in parents’ homes and garages made something that sounded, in the best cases, like it wasn’t even from this world."

"I go by my original story – greatest album ever made. It’s incredible, beautiful. ‘Killing Moon’ is genius – the best song ever written. It was the first song we recorded before we went to Paris to do the full album, and the chorus came to me. I woke up one morning and I know it was sunny, and I sat upright with words that God had given to me in my sleep. It wasn’t like a dream, I just woke up with the words, and that has never happened before or since. I legged it to find a guitar to get the chords down, and obviously to write the words down. Divine inspiration, and that was it. I haven’t really credited Our Lord with the lyrics before. Would I change anything about the album? I like my voice better now, but having said that, most people would disagree, so no, not really. I think it’s a complete thing. ‘The Yo-Yo Man’ is not my favourite, but it sets it up right for that album. I always used to do the first track and last tracks of the two sides as the core songs. People were familiar with ‘Killing Moon’ by then anyway, but imagine if they’d got to the album without hearing it – it would have been like, “Whoa, what the fuck?” And then ‘Ocean Rain’ - the closer of closers. All in under 40 minutes – it’s like a Sixties record. It wasn’t the easiest album to sell to America, but it certainly inspired other people in bands in America to go on and reap more rewards than we did. I’m surprised that Warners didn’t press the button [and promote it properly in the US]. In those days you’d hire a plugger. Wayne Coyne thinks it’s the best album ever, but it just didn’t have the exposure. And we weren’t really a band that toured for long periods - I’d miss Liverpool too much. More European influences I suppose. But then we were the best band in the world and we’d just created that… and you’re not going to bribe people?"

"This next one is controversial. It's Spiderland by Slint. It actually pipped out Isn't Anything by My Bloody Valentine. They did that because one of the reasons that I really love Isn't Anything is the sound of the guitars (and it's a wonderful record, don't get me wrong) but there's another record coming up that took that place. I think Spiderland was quite a transformative record when I first heard it. It was Dominic played it to me. When we started the band we made mixtapes for each other of music that we liked, which was good actually because apart from one or two, I'd never heard of any of the bands that Dominic liked. He put 'Washer' on that tape and it totally blew my mind… I actually even remember what part of the motorway I was on driving back from Dominic's house to my house when it kicked in back loud. I do have a good memory for motorways. It's got a unique atmosphere to it, it does make sense but it doesn't make sense. It's got a really eerie atmosphere, a really strange album. I love it lots. It didn't really annoy me [that Mogwai were compared to Slint] because a lot of it was through ignorance. We don't actually sound like Slint at all. A couple of songs had little sections that maybe did, ‘Christmas Steps' has a little bit in it that's Slint-ish, but I think a lot of the people that said that just didn't like us and just said that. A lot of those people probably adore Rid Of Me by PJ Harvey, which does sound like Slint! That's a great record too, but musically sounds a lot more similar to Slint than anything we did. But no, that doesn't bother me. Lance Bangs has made a film about Slint, and from what I saw of the bit they showed at ATP, I think it's going to be the best film about a rock band ever made. Unbelievable. I think people are going to be quite taken aback when they see the story of the band."

"I associate this album with a specific moment in my life. We never had a TV until I was about 16, so we would only hear about stuff like The Simpsons and Neighbours from friends. They seemed exotic and distant. But this one time I did see an episode of Neighbours in which one of the main characters got hit by a car, and it really fucked me up! I'd never seen anything like it before. And so, as I was driving home, my mum had Sgt. Pepper's on in the car and I was listening to 'A Day In The Life', and I was looking at a certain spot in the road, and I heard the line, which goes ""he blew his mind out in a car"", and it all suddenly came together. I imagined a car crash and I imagined this spot on the road and I imagined what I'd just seen with this song. And I think that is the first time that I genuinely understood the concept of death. I was probably only about five. That's the thing about The Beatles, you can get it into you from zero up. I never forgot that feeling of being petrified and understanding death for the first time. And the music did that to me. It wasn't Neighbours or the road, it was the fact that somehow that song had transported me and helped me to understand a real emotion. He [Lennon] had been dead about five years at that point. Children love The Beatles, and they love Queen, because there is something about those bands that is so colourful and fun and they create such a world. And the Sgt. Pepper's world is so easy to visualise, you can literally hear the crowd and the characters and the colours, the carnival air. It's all just magical. I've always enjoyed the fact that my band doesn't sound the same from song to song, and I think we get that from The Beatles. The Beatles were every type of band for ten years, and then they were nothing, which is probably why they are the most famous band in the world."