"So the The Wolf King Of L.A. and There's A Riot Goin' On were both recorded in the same studio. John Phillips bought Jeanette McDonald, a Hollywood actress, a mansion in Bel Air. And he illegally built a studio in the attic, which was huge. I guess there were building restrictions, but he just wanted to build a recording studio in there. He recorded the album in that place. Now coming on to the transcendent, joyous, pop glory of The Mamas & The Papas, The Wolf King Of L.A. is a very strange album. I think John was hanging out with Gram Parsons and as a result, the record is a country-soul-pop album. In The Mamas & The Papas, he was writing for a pop audience and I guess that was a message to Michelle Phillips because they're both adulterers, I think. John would write a song and get Denny Doherty to sing it because he knew he was having an affair with his wife. John was quite a dark guy! They were very personal songs, but also universal because he was writing for a pop audience. But with Wolf King, he went solo. Phillips became deeply addicted to heroin, coke and everything else. He was a very advanced drug addict. Wolf King Of L.A. is a very soulful album. John wrote and arranged the songs for The Mamas & The Papas but his voice was hidden in the mix as Denny and Michelle had incredible voices. But on this album, it's just his voice. And I believe that the session musicians were Phil Spector's Wrecking Crew and are the same guys who played on The Mamas & The Papas records. They loved John Phillips and thought he was a fucking great guy. It's one of those records I haven't stopped playing for 30 years and a great document of rock and LA culture in the late '60s. It's also got a great cover with John wearing a top hat standing on Malibu beach with the sun setting looking absolutely wasted."

"Yeah, my mum bought it for Christmas. I must've been 18 at the time or something. I find it quite cool that my mum actually went into a record shop and asked for Metal Box by Public Image! There were only a few thousand made, so it was limited edition. But I was a huge PiL fan, I loved the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten/Lydon and when the Pistols split, everybody was waiting to see what he's going to come back with. Nobody could believe that he would return with this. They sounded like nothing you'd heard before. The first track, 'Albatross', is basically listening to Lydon screaming that he wishes he would die for ten minutes, or a junkyard having a nervous breakdown! The album has these metallic smashes and clangs, which I'd never heard in music before. This is considered one of the first post-punk albums, alongside the Siouxsie and the Banshees record, but before Metal Box, it would probably have been Pere Ubu's first album. From a UK fan's perspective, Banshees and PiL would have made the first post-punk records. We'd bought 'Death Disco' on 12"" records, but to buy an album in a canister, cut and mastered really loudly, bursting out of my speakers was something strange. These were not rock & roll songs, they didn't have a lot of dynamic to them at times either. They were danceable though, with a disco drumbeat, a dub reggae bass, playing Swan Lake on guitar, with Lydon screaming about his mother having cancer over the top of it and ending up on Top Of The Pops. That's avant-garde being taken into the fuckin' mainstream. To me that's very revolutionary and subversive. It was a real howl from the soul. Every time I listen to Metal Box, I remember what it was like to live in Britain in the late '70s when I was a teenager. It was a grey, damp, repressive country and that record reflects the state and times perfectly. It was a snapshot of the times."

"It's a film that my parents introduced me to when I was younger that's by a director called Pasolini. It's a black and white film about the life and times of Jesus Christ. The only words on screen are words from the Bible. So it's a quite direct representation of that particular gospel story, according to Matthew, but it's a really inventive film. The director may have taken the story direct from the Bible, but what he does with the music and editing, as well as the use of non-actors in the film, it's just a really original and moving film. It features scenes where at points you're hearing a gospel song by Odetta, and she's singing a song called, 'Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child' which is this amazing gospel tune. She's singing that to accompany scenes of the children being killed by Herod. The music in the film is very raw. It'll use a song that's going to spell something out literally. I don't know how Pasolini chose all these songs for the film or who was in charge of the music selection. You've got Blind Willie Johnson - the old blues artist - accompanying some of the miracle scenes where people are getting their sight back. It's an exercise in juxtaposing very disparate elements that actually really enhance each other. You have to second guess it though, because of the way it's edited, a scene will suddenly just be chopped really harshly, and the film will move on to something else. All of these things are very powerful - and unusual - devices in film-making. In a way, if it's not too pretentious to say it, some of that harsh editing and juxtaposing with disparate elements on screen with music is something that I feel inspired by in terms of making a record. Things don't always have to fit together neatly, or as you'd expect them to. If you think about it in terms of the Alex Chilton record I mentioned earlier, that album is kind of a guide through rock & roll, country and soul music or Americana if you like, and this one is a guide to raw, blues and gospel as well as a classical take on the gospel. It's a very eclectic soundtrack with music that definitely enhances what's going on on the screen. It's very powerful music in its own right."

"Like with the Slade live album, I'd been to see The Who and it was quite an experience, again at the Orchid Ballroom in Purley. It's one of the most unknown venues in the country, I think, but it was the biggest ballroom in Europe and it used to hold about 5000 people. It was huge, and you wouldn't even know it was there when you drove past; it was just a doorway, in Purley. And I think The Who had just come back from America where they'd been doing Tommy. So it was Townshend in his white boiler suit and nailing Keith Moon's drums down before the set, and The James Gang opening. I'm not sure when Live At Leeds came out, whether it was before or after that, but I just remember how amazing the album was because it had all of those pull-outs and receipts and photographs and things. I was sitting on the train and looking at the record and really hoping that people would think I was in the record business and that I'd received this white label with a load of bills. But again I'd seen them play that sort of show, and I think Live At Leeds really was them at the top of their game. As a live band they'd really pulled together and they'd done their homework. They'd done enough and they'd really nailed how to put it together on stage. For me they didn't do a better live thing. Tommy I liked, but I thought a lot of it was unnecessary and went on a bit, and it was a bit more Who than I wanted, in some cases. The real thing that always stuck with me with this record is where they do the jamming stuff and Townshend takes off on that discordant thing, and the dynamics and atmosphere are liable to go up and down, taking it from this raging onslaught of rock down to this level of almost subtlety, and then to build it up again from that. They're good dynamics, and those are often hard to find. There's something about that sound they got as well: not so much as a band but just the guitar sound. It was very clean and there was a lot of clarity. And the drums: the sound never changes, but the dynamics of what he does have peaks and troughs."

"They were an underground band who started releasing cassettes in 1982 and are from Aberteifi in South West Wales, so they weren't part of a scene. They were from a small, working class town where, strangely, an interesting guy called Malcolm Neon had set up a cassette label, releasing electronic music in the Welsh language. So they kinda fit in – he put a tape of theirs out and gradually they released more albums, which would end up on the Anhrern, a punk rock Welsh language label which John Peel started to play. By the time Pyst came out in 1990, David R. Edwards' voice was becoming the key critical voice of the Welsh language. He held a mirror to society and to himself that was so brutally honest: they weren't embraced by the media at the time because they were misunderstood. They were gradually more acclaimed for their genius as time went on. The name of the band translates to English as 'developing', so they had experimenting as part of their reason for existing. By this time, it was David R. Edwards and Pat Morgan on bass and she brought a really distinctive musicality to the band. Their first two albums had been produced by Gorwel Owen who, for me, is like a Welsh Conny Plank, so everything was experimental but also really well-recorded. And this album [Datblygu] is a mixture of great songwriting. He can – when it's necessary - write a conventional pop song but delivered in a unique way like the classic, timeless songs. We covered one of these, 'Y Teimlad', on the Super Furry Animals' record Mwng. There are some great songs on this record – one is 'Ugain I Un' which is like a generic country and western song about being a horse [running] at [odds of] 20/1 who fails a jump and gets shot before the end of the song. There's another pop song called 'Am' which is just great pop music! But [the album is] always experimental and you could compare David to people like Mark E. Smith, Nick Cave and Allen Ginsberg, people with an honesty and darkness which is timeless as the lyrics deal with basic human traits. This isn't self-consciously Welsh. In fact, it's very critical of Welsh society in the Welsh language as that's the most honest way you could communicate [this idea]. And it captures Wales at that time where there was a great non-conformist musical streak going on ."