"I heard Nick Drake quite early on, in 1981, when nobody of our generation really knew him. A friend of mine had a big brother who had given him the Fruit Tree box set [first released in 1979]. When I heard it I was all, 'What is this?' Listening to him, I felt like I was going into a world no-one else knew, especially when everyone else was into post-punk. I also found it very sad, as it was the last album he made a few years before he died.

I've got a funny story about it, too. I did one of my first sessions for Manchester Piccadilly Radio in 1981 or so, when Mark Radcliffe was working there. I came down on the bus all the way from Hull, and he was housesitting for someone in the music industry at the time – I can't remember who – but I had nowhere to stay, so I just slept on the floor there. I remember staying up late with Mark going through this music industry guy's record collection, then finding some Nick Drake records and getting really excited. Going, 'Oh, Mark, do you know him?', and Mark going, 'No, who's he? He's great!' He became a big fan."

"That's pretty obvious. When I got turned onto it, I was like, "Okay, I'll pick up the guitar!" My favourite parts of it are the sonics. It's nothing like anyone's heard. Pete Townshend was like, "Alright, I quit the guitar." [laughs] That instrumental, 'Third Stone From The Sun', boy, how good is that? There's a video of Stevie Ray Vaughan - have you seen that? He did it fucking note-for-note! It's incredible! It's like, "Who the fuck is this guy?!" I just love it. I would say around 12 years old when I bought it. Then, I loved the poppier ones, like 'Fire' and obviously 'Purple Haze', had to learn that riff. I figured out what he was playing through a painful process. I'm not as fluid on guitar as my little brother, who can hear it once and just do it. That song has a chord, an E7#9 - I use it a lot! I use it on 'Tame': it's the one where everyone's hitting three chords and I'm hitting that chord and that's all I'm hitting. It's one of those chords that's either a question mark or an answer. It's very neutral, but more interesting than a major chord."

"I also loved Madeline L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.” My introduction to it was by my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Jeness, who read it aloud to us in class, a chapter at a time. Each day I could hardly wait for him to begin reading. I very closely identified with the heroine, Meg Murry, a girl who felt extremely disenfranchised in her world. She was physically awkward – skinny, with glasses and braces and crazy hair – felt socially inept, and was close only to her very brilliant, but very strange baby brother, Charles Wallace. Their father, a scientist, has been missing for some time – and one night the crazy ladies next door (witches, presumably – science fiction witches) prevail upon the children, and their friend, Calvin to “tesseract” through time and space to rescue Meg’s father. When they reach the planet where their father is held captive, they discover that it is a place where there is no free will, and beings are governed by a tyrannical “IT” a pulsing, logical brain that insists on conformity. Meg triumphs at the end, by using her illogical self – her passion for language, her emotional heart, and her tremendous love for her family. She saves them using only her awkward, non-conforming self as a weapon."

"You know what, I think I’m going to swerve The Godfather and go for The King of Comedy. I love Scorsese – I loved Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Mean Streets — they were all really seminal, but I always like a film which is, if not leftfield it’s not obvious Scorsese. He has made less obvious films, like New York, New York or The Last Waltz, which don’t hit the mark for me, but King of Comedy is a gem I think. Curiously enough I was talking about it to my fiancé at the weekend, saying, ‘You’ve got to see it,’ because I think it’s where we are now as a contemporary celebrity-seeking society. There are Rupert Pupkins everywhere now. What they don’t have, that Rupert Pupkin had, is innocence and naivety. When you see the whole Big Brother world, the way that people are cloying to get famous now, that’s Rupert Pupkin. I remember when I first watched The Office I saw a lot of Rupert Pupkin in David Brent. Rupert Pupkin had such likeability whereas Brent is a toad – you want to watch him fail. With Pupkin you want to say, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t go to Jerry Lewis‘ house. Don’t tell Diahnne Abbott you know him — you don’t!'"

"I think to this day that whole album, Fly Or Die is one of my top buys for so many reasons - every time I go back to it there's other things I hear in it. Even bigger than that, it was Pharrell and what he did with N/E*/R/D. It was the first thing that I identified with. I used to skateboard, and I always felt like what I was doing was ‘other’. And then I saw that and I was like ‘Oh. Sick.’ Someone gets it. There’s another black guy, skateboarding and they were into rap and hip hop and making beats and he plays drums. It was like there's room to do what I do, you know what I mean? This has never sounded old, like some records do. Some records of that era you listen back and they don’t age well. But I feel like that particular one, it's still very raw, still very honest. That was one of the first CDs I got in secondary school. My brother went to America and brought it back. And I was like ‘What dyou get for me?’ and he was like ‘Uhhhh... here.’ I’m glad I asked that question."