"I got to Scott Walker quite late. I got into him because I read a lot of comparisons between Dog Man Star or 'The Big Time', the B-side to [Suede's] 'Animal Nitrate', and him. I knew The Walker Brothers of course, but I didn't know his solo stuff. What I like about Scott Walker is that it's millimetres away from easy listening, but is still not easy listening. There's the occasional little detail or bar that he puts in there that makes it not easy listening. Scott 3 for me is an amazing record. The first few songs on that, especially songs like 'Big Louise', are such powerful pieces of music. He's one of the greatest singers ever. It's amazing to see how powerful a voice can be, I don't mean in a macho sense, but how if the voice is doing something fascinating how minimal the music can be. I love the way he's still making strange records, like The Drift and Tilt. You've got to admire him for marginalising himself, and still doing interesting stuff at his age, because it's quite rare isn't it? You wonder where he's going to go next."

"Iggy reminds me a lot of me. And it's all in that name; it's all in the title of that album. It’s raw power, you know? I like the funk that David Bowie was able to get behind Iggy. Believe it or not, I first saw an image of Iggy Pop at church, and they were talking about secret messages and backward masking - and they had [a picture of] Iggy Pop looking crazy. I didn't get into it until later, but I think how I was introduced to it was 'I Wanna Be Your Dog'. And what I like about Iggy is it's just genuine raunch. And the album seems like it’s all done in one take. 'Let's do that one, leave it, just try something else'. With his energy on stage, it seems as if the studio was just destroyed after that album - or at least you'd like to believe that. I just read an interview with him in which he said he wrote a lot of it in Hyde Park sitting under a tree wearing pyjama's too, which gave it a cool twist as well. I just love 'Search And Destroy' and 'I Need Somebody' as well."

"This was a record I got in my youth; I was really, really young. My sister had previously turned me on to a lot of different music but this was the beginning of my own branching out. I was starting to get my own identity. I had gotten a few weird records of my own and one of them was KISS's Hotter Than Hell and this one came shortly afterwards. What a lot of people missed with Bowie was that he really knew how to jam on an acoustic. They were great pop rock songs but were mostly played on an acoustic. Of course he had a great lead guitar player in Mick Ronson and when you can mix that up with acoustic playing, then you've got something really cool. I have learned some of his songs and it may not be that the chord progressions are unusual, as some people say, but it's the exotic chord choices that make the music weird. Some of those chords always make me think of a dog when he turns his head sideways and looks at you as if to say, ""Are you going to eat that?"

"I see this as the mothership of a whole new century and a step further in the sexual adventures of pop culture. Antony means something to me emotionally. It was a perfect work of art, and people who I'd recommended it to, had despaired at my recommendation and couldn't understand it, and found it depressing, but it just came in a moment in my life when sadly my pet dog died, and it was just before its 17th birthday. He meant a lot to me and it was almost like having a child - a constant companion. I kind of cried non-stop for three months. I was in a gloomy cloud. But there was some sort of hope amongst the glamour and the gloom on that record, and a rebirth or coming out of a cocoon like a butterfly. I did get to meet him after the Turning show at the Barbican - and he's a big bird, isn't he? I also met Andy Butler [of Hercules & Love Affair] who was working on that tour and all the other glamorous characters. That was quite a special moment for me, the Turning performances. That was quite a momentous album."