"""This one is like the mystery house on Escape to the Country, it’s a curveball. The point I wanted to make with ‘2-4-6-8 Motorway’ is that it’s not one of my favourite songs, the point is it’s always been there but I only really discovered it and fell in love with it in the last couple of weeks. That’s one of the most exciting and inspiring things about making music, discovering songs that have existed your whole life, even though you may have only been semi-aware of them. “I’ve always found it much easier to place my faith in songs that have existed my whole life than a new band or a new artist, you know what they are, you know they’re not going to let you down, they’re not going to do anything sexist or say anything racist or make a terrible second EP. “It’s also so exciting discovering things, I love all those reissue labels like Light in the Attic and finding these treasure troves of records and artists that have been there your whole life, like ‘How has this existed my entire time on earth and I’ve never stumbled upon it?’ ‘2-4-6-8 Motorway’ is a stone cold classic, it’s very British, it’s a big song."""

"""I bought the first Buzzcocks album on the day it came out. I still have it in its plastic carrier bag. I knew it was going to be good as the Buzzcocks were already great. There was an excitement about being a youngster and liking the Buzzcocks at that time. Again, they were from my town and it was unheard of at that time for a band from Manchester to get the kind of commercial attention the Buzzcocks were attracting. They were on Top Of The Pops and were influencing other bands from around the country. And they sounded like they were from Manchester too. They were clever lyrically and clever musically. Buzzcocks made modern guitar music that was appropriately punky but sounded razor-sharp on the radio in the middle of such a load of mainstream nonsense, which was a great source of pride for many Mancunians. That, coupled with the aesthetic of the band and the way they did their sleeve artwork and the way they dressed, was a very potent combination. Buzzcocks influenced The Smiths massively in the way we approached our record sleeves and our choice of independent record company - because of the Buzzcocks we took on a Mancunian DIY ethic, whilst being in the charts."""

"I was very fortunate. My dad was a musician, he would take me around to recording studios in Houston. I got to hear some really rippin’ stuff at a very young age. There were all of these rambunctious country artists and guys playing this hod-rod hillbilly music. It blew my mind, as you can imagine. Well, one day we to went ACA Studios, and I got to see BB King play. I must’ve been about seven years old. What a trip! “Needless to say, he made a big impression, and later on, I got ahold of this record, which has always been one of my favorites. Something about it just resonates. The lead lines that BB plays are chilling. Although it’s called ‘Singin’ The Blues,’ on this album I think the guitar really comes to the fore as a strident solo instrument. “It’s often been said that Billy could do more with one note than most guitarists can do with 100, and I think it might have started right here. He had developed his technique so fully - it was so unique and elegant – that he was able to play these ‘blue’ notes on songs that even had almost cha-cha beats. This is a record I never have to rediscover because it never went away"

"Me and James were obsessed with the NME ‘100 Best Albums Of All Time’ in the mid 80s, so we started buying as many as we could - Marquee Moon, Blonde On Blonde, The Clash... some of them we had anyway, but then there were things like Pet Sounds, which was really high, and when you’re 14 you think of the Beach Boys as fucking idiots going “doo wop”, don’t you? We both got What’s Going On and I think it’s the first time I realised, in an exotic way, that politics could translate. Through colour, through country - you could still feel the desperation of someone else even though it was your first exposure to music like that. Obviously my Mum and Dad had tons of records, but the intimacy of playing that in your bedroom and being transported to another world of the same anger you were feeling, but then in such a graceful way. ‘Inner City Blues’, the title track, ‘Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)’. There’s lot’s of brackets - lot’s of songs with brackets. I love that idea of brackets. I love the cover. You can still put it on today, and obviously in the studio we have lots of vinyl and a record player - you put that one in particular and it drifts, it seduces you but it also stimulates."

"One of the classic albums. Played it to death. I was pissed off when it came out, it was when the Bunnymen had just split up and it would have inspired me with the band. When he gets it right, Michael Stipe, he’s just brilliant. It’s not that kind of American music that makes you feel queasy like The Eagles, it’s more indie. When you go to America and see some of the natural beautiful vastness of the country, it moves you onto your kneecaps, the prairie beauty of it. ‘Find The River’ - when I heard that it was instant choking up. I went up to my missus at the time and didn’t know if I could speak. I wrote ‘Nothing Ever Lasts Forever’ after it. I don’t know if it was inspired by it. It made me like a type of American that I’ve never liked, the Mark Twainy kind. For some reason it connected with me, but the last thing I’d like to do is buy a pair of dungarees and go net fishing in a stagnant pond. But each to their own – Stipey obviously does it. The videos and the bit in ‘Man In The Moon’ where he does the little shuffle and the Elvis “hey baby” - when I saw that I thought, you twat, you’ve got it completely right, and here’s me hacking about with some half-baked solo songs. And they were half-baked, some of them from Mysterio. But after Automatic they did too much and a lot of it wasn’t up to that standard."