"I can't say enough about this album. I heard that when The Stooges came out everyone thought they were retro garage band not realising they were pointing the way forward to punk. Every song on Is This It is amazing. I played 'Modern Age' for my daughter the other day, and just for that song alone it could be one of the greatest albums. I was there for the making of the record and I was so blown away by their dedication to making this perfect music and executing it perfectly every night. It was crazy. These guys would really yell at each other if they missed one chord or beat. They were perfectionists. They were the first band of my age group who were great. There's a level of precision that The Strokes brought to making their music and their approach to it – the way Fab tried to emulate a drum machine in his playing – it feels obvious to people now but it was counter-intuitive at the time, no one had done that. Everything about Is This It was a statement in the opposite direction to what everyone else was doing. Before this the trend was for people make albums that sounded like they were performed in arena, they're soaked with reverb, Is This It is this weird insular record with the distorted vocals. People were confused by the decisions that were made when it was made when it came out, but now you hear it copied infinitely. It's funny that for a band that were criticised for being retro they've now come to define their own times."

"The next one is a little-known obscure album called Hunky Dory! I grew up listening to David Bowie's songs in the background. I knew he existed and knew his hits and whatnot. I had the same thing with The Beatles. When I was 17 I saw that my dad had Hunky Dory and I realised that I had never really actually listened properly to David Bowie. I thought of him as a pop star – which he is – but he's obviously a lot more than that. I remember putting it on and listening to it in the lounge and actually thinking it was almost too much – it was a collection of songs that were all so good that it was too much to digest. It absolutely blew my mind at how mercurial he was on one record. He wasn't writing songs just about love, but about all these crazy, bizarre ideas. It contained really weirdly strange anthems that weren't like anything I'd heard. I remember really trying to piece together who David Bowie was in his entirety, as opposed to him just being that guy who dresses up like a woman sometimes and was a pop star, and beginning to understand the gravity of how talented he was. I remember listening to the song 'Andy Warhol' over and over and over again and thinking it was the best song I had ever heard in my life and then trying to learn it on guitar. So, it was the moment of realising, ""Oh my god, David Bowie!"" but there is no real point in me explaining why it is such a good album. It's obvious."

"I would say my number one movie: Purple Rain. I could probably teach a semester of film studies on the first eight minutes of Purple Rain. And if you watch that first eight minutes, you’re going to see why, because the way the music — it’s like the extended version of “Let’s Go Crazy” — the way it’s cut, continuity completely goes out the window. You’ll be on stage with Prince, but then you’ll cut and you’ll see him getting ready to go on stage, then you’ll see him at his house, blowing out candles. Then you see him on his motorcycle coming to the club, cuts to him on stage in the club, cuts to Apollonia coming into town… By the end of that eight minutes, you know everybody’s character, you know their relationship to each other, and the music never stopped. It’s a dizzying… I think you see three tongues within the first eight minutes. You know, Apollonia’s boobs were like an atom bomb going off in my world, because up until that moment, I wanted to marry women, like, “I like that girl. I would want her to be my wife and have kids with her.” But then I saw Apollonia, and I was like, “I have thoughts now in my head that I didn’t have before, and feelings that I’ve never had before!” The same poster that I got at a fair in Vallejo, California of Apollonia in a bikini is up on my wall here in my office, and people still come in here and go, “Damn, I had that poster on my wall!”"