"Andy might have been cheating a little bit by picking two Pogues songs, and I might be doing the same with this, because it’s just under an hour long. I’m getting my money’s worth out of my three picks! “The first time I heard this track was when it was sampled by an Italian house band called Sueño Latino in the late 80s’. Their version had more of a four-on-the-floor kick to it, so you could dance to it and that’s where I first heard it, in Ibiza way back. It really spoke to me straight away; I couldn’t pinpoint any of the sounds and it felt as if it came from the future. It had this Balearic, soulful feel to it and yet it was electronic. It was about as far out a piece of music as I’d experienced and it seemed totally unique at the time. “I slowly unravelled it and got back to the original by Manuel Göttsching, which is just mind-blowing. It goes back to the days of those electronic concept albums. I read somewhere that it wasn’t ever supposed to be released, that he just made it for himself so that he had something to listen to on long-haul flights - which is the kind of self-indulgence you expect from a German electronic pioneer! “I love that it has so much soul and yet it still doesn’t sound as if it’s of this world. It’s a total shapeshifter and there’s still an intoxicating sense of escapism about it for me, which is something I’m always chasing in my own work. Like the Beck and Smiths songs, it was a track that had a profound effect on me, and made me think, “I want to learn how to do that, or at least try. I want to live in that world."

"In the past year or two I’ve really been getting into more electronic music, and finding there’s so many subgenres! I’ve found this niche of really melodic electronic music, like Jamie xx and Jon Hopkins, and I just found it so soulful – it gives you this energy at the same time. That’s really opened a world up for me, ‘cause I always assumed electronic music couldn’t be as musical! Hearing this new sound, and these new methods of being musical through newer instruments, I was like, ‘wow!’ You can really reach that point of emotion in such a different, more energetic way. ""I just love this song. It’s a masterpiece, and I love the video as well. Learning about production a lot on this last album, it’s such a skill to let each element shine through and complement one another. The main thing for me is that simple line that comes in – a synth or something – halfway through, and the way everything builds. It’s like a symphony, really. Ever piece has been so considering in the song, and has such an emotional impact. It changes one note, and you’re sucked into a deeper level of emotion of the song. It’s effortlessly epic! ""I’ve used 'Gosh' so many times to warm up before a show, to get in a very focussed sense before a performance or doing anything high-pressure. It’s definitely our tour song. It has so many emotional memories for everyone that was on tour – our cameraman had to go ‘cause his first son was about to be born, so we played that song for him when he left. It’s never got boring to me, and I think I’ve rinsed it for about two years now! It’s never lost its magic. It just gives me life every time I hear it."

"When I was a kid I heard all this strange electronic music that came from Germany on pirate radio and on the Peel show and it seemed like music from another planet and I wanted it. Then one afternoon I was listening to Radio 1 and Annie Nightingale played one whole side of Rubycon and it was life changing. I said to her, many years later, "that was incredible!" and she said, "oh John used to do that all the time, he was the first to do that." But it was like Annie became a pirate for one moment and took over the whole of Radio 1. That meant a lot. That was the spirit of making music to me. You do what feels right. If you want to play half an hour, you do it and accept the consequences but you have to do what the music tells you to do. Tangerine Dream made these extraordinary, electronic soundscapes. Is it an animal or is it a machine? Tangerine Dream crossed over that a lot. And then Annie played the entire side and blew my head."

"This record is, in a way, similar to Dome’s 1 + 2. Yet Tod Dockstader is more classical, electronic tape music, I love him. And this is all stuff I was listening to before I was 20 years old. I ate it all up in fast forward, like rapid fire. I was in record shops all the time and reading whatever I could, discovering things like this. I was scouring record catalogues and just came across it, just like how I found most of the records I really love."

"If I were stuck on a desert island, I’d find it hard to let go of this record! It encapsulates every part of the perfect beauty of classical music, particularly Bach, yet it uses that with electronic synthesiser. It’s a totally new world, bringing the future and I think it’s fantastic. It also featured on A Clockwork Orange, which featured the 9th Symphony by Beethoven and is also one of my all-time favourite records. But that wasn’t on Switched On Bach, so I had to source the origin of that later."

" I’m very lucky because I do it at the BBC, so there are no advertisements, and I’m allowed to choose all of the music myself and invite people in to interview them. For instance, there’s a group of girls called Stealing Sheep and I quite like their records, and there’s a label called Clay Pipe Music that releases really nice, short-run albums, often kind of pastoral sounds, sometimes electronic stuff. I can really just make the show two hours where I share stuff that I like with people. I love doing that."

"This dark, fast-paced novel is a visionary masterpiece. It’s populated by hackers and cyberpunks, Gibson’s creations that have since become fixtures in the electronic matrix. I first read the book in the mid-1990s, when the Internet was beginning to wrap itself around all of us, and I read it with increasing excitement—but not without some difficulty. Gibson doesn’t bother to explain his terms or lead the reader by the hand through the puzzling dislocations of his futuristic landscape. Neuromancer is pulp fiction, but it’s guided by a hip wisdom about a baffling phenomenon that was only beginning to take shape."