"London Calling is probably my favourite rock record of all time. It’s incredibly powerful and diverse, it’s social, political and has all sorts of musical genres - punk, rock, ska, ballads, jazz and dub - rolled into the song arrangements. The Clash were at their peak when they made it and the kick-off track is the most anthemic song they ever wrote. It’s got everything, brilliant lyrics, a brilliant performance, it just sounds killer and Mick Jones’ guitar playing is phenomenal, when you hear that guitar riff it’s like a fire alarm going off. ‘London Calling’ is like a call to arms, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up every time I hear it, it’s that powerful. I went to see them on that tour at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago and it was absolutely rammed. The second they started playing the entire room started jumping up and down and I thought the building was going to collapse, you could feel the whole place shaking. It was an old theatre and I was watching from the balcony, thinking we should maybe get to a safer location but I became so immersed in the music I forgot about it, it was a fantastic show. There were obviously differences between the British and US punk bands and some of that is in the sound of the records. The British records had a bit of a darker sound to them and that could be due to technical stuff in the mastering, but a lot of it had to do with the performances. To me, the British bands have always been ground-breaking, as a whole there were better new wave and punk bands coming out of the UK than the US, it was like the second British invasion. There was a great scene in New York, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Television and Blondie were ground-breaking at the time, but England, a country with a much smaller population than the US, had a larger percentage of iconic bands from that era."

"From one extreme to the other. Belle and Sebastian were one side of what was happening in Glasgow, and Scotland, in the ‘90s when I was really young and just starting out and to me Country Teasers represent another parallel, a much darker and more sinister side of what was going on. “They came out of Edinburgh, where they were all from, apart from Ben Wallers, the singer, who’s English. They’re another band I put on in The 13th Note and another band I was drawn to both sonically and lyrically. As you’ll know if you’ve heard this record, Destroy All Human Life, some of the lyrics are extremely difficult. Ben’s attitude has always been to try to make people as uncomfortable as they possibly can be and to explore issues that are usually not talked about at all. “This song, weirdly, I find to be quite beautiful; the melodic line is really wistful and melancholic, which as I said, is what I was aiming for with this collection of songs. There’s a sort of perverse humour to this particular track too. That’s what makes it all the more vivid for me; he’s talking about his bandmates, who I can picture because I knew all those characters at the time. “He rips into them mercilessly! He’s saying Richie’s so weak he almost can’t be seen and something about Eck being skinny and Alan, the guitarist, having a big hook nose. Simon, I think, he said had funny feet and then at the end, he says, “I am the perfect image of mankind / Made by god to remind him of his son / My back is straight like a straight white line / Golden apples issue from the hole in my bum.” It’s really fucking funny! “And also, it captures a particular sense of humour that was shared by a lot of people I hung out with in Scotland at that time and still do. It’s quite dark and sadistic.”"

"Nebraska is different from all the other Bruce Springsteen albums because it's not very bombastic! It's just acoustic guitar on a four-track machine. It's got to be the most lo-fi record you could get from Bruce Springsteen. I believe that's because he made demos for the E Street Band, and just didn't like how they sounded when they were played with the band. His producers, and I think one of his bandmates said to him, "The demos sound better". When I first heard it, I think that I only knew Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie in terms of that type of sound - someone working with a harmonica and an acoustic guitar. He's writing about the working classes of America, or people who are failing in their lives or trying to make it but failing. It's darker than other records too though. I think he's taking inspiration from stories he's read in the newspaper about criminals who are serving life sentences or those who are going to the electric chair. At the same time, it's about families, brothers and someone's father who is no long alive. It's got a lot of humanity in it as a record, with this resonating and wonderful sound - daunting vocals and very haunting harmonica parts. There are also loads of reverbs and a glockenspiel is on there too. It's a murky-sounding record at first, but the more you listen to it, you find all of these other details. I was at school when I first heard it. I couldn't think of an obvious way that Bruce has influenced me, until I wrote a song called 'Elvis Has Left The Building' which is on my new album. I just thought that the kind of song it was, and the mood, reminded me of 'Streets Of Philadelphia' or 'Nebraska' - not in an obvious way, and I didn't think of him in order to write it, but it reminded me of that in an odd way."

"This was also quite a challenging record for me. I bought the 7"" of 'Ceremony' when it came out, and I thought that's what Movement was going to sound like. A very pretty, emotional, bucolic record, and of course it has moments like that, but in a strange way it's almost darker than Closer. When I was 14 or 15-years-old I was full ensconced on the cult of Ian Curtis, so when I got Movement I listened to it and tried to decode it... how many songs were influenced by Ian Curtis, how many songs were written by Ian Curtis, were they trying to communicate with Ian from beyond the grave. It's certainly the darkest of all the New Order records, and after this they became much more melodic and happy. The first track on the record is quite uplifting, then everything else is quite dark. One of the things I've always loved about Bernard Sumner's voice is there's a naive, vulnerable quality to it. I was at an airport the other day and 'A Perfect Kiss' came on, I hadn't listened to it in about 25 years, and it's such a perfect song. His vocals are sing-songy, like a nursery rhyme, but they're so effective. Each of these records that we've talked about, one thing they have in common is that they're all primarily electronic. At the time I was completely surrounded by very traditional rock music, and it felt interesting and subversive to be listening to these records primarily made with electronic instruments. I think that affected me a lot. I was a guitar player at the time, and I was so bored and frustrated with playing the guitar because it didn't do that much. I couldn't figure out how to make a guitar not sound like a guitar, and then you hear all these electronic records with all these textures and atmospheres and sounds that I'd never heard before, and I found that quite exciting."