"I think what’s cool about Slayer is no matter how old their albums are, it’s the one band to me that their sound is immortal. It never sounds corny to me. You can go back and listen to some Pantera and Metallica albums and you’re like, ‘OK, great music.’ But Slayer you go back and they always sound fresh and hard as hell. It’s always just a punch right to the face. I think that’s cool that their albums are almost undying. I like all different types of music. I don’t like going to any specifics. I switch with the seasons. I’ll get into an electronic kick and then I’ll get into rap. Listen to too much hip-hop you start to have some flavor for some guitar and next thing you know you’re listening to metal or hardcore"

"Dare was amazing. It came out around the same time as Soft Cell's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. You can't not mention Soft Cell, and you can't not mention Gary Numan either, in popularising electronic music. I'd seen The Human League perform at Eric's in front of three people - me, Jane Casey and some drunk lying on the floor - and it was in the Martyn Ware era, with Phil Oakey looking amazing with his asymmetric haircut, and the fabulous slides and the little constructed archways which had the synthesizers, which looked - I suppose - rather Kraftwerk. And you know, ""Listen to the voice of Buddha"" [on 'Being Boiled'], the Travelogue album, was amazing and groundbreaking in many ways. It was not commercially successful at all, and I remember in particular their version of 'You've Lost That Loving Feeling' being incredible. But when Dare came, it was an attempt at global pop superstardom and ABBA-ness, as well as being groundbreaking and electronic. It was time I became aware of the Linn drum machine, and the programming on that album is fantastic. The engineer Dave Allen at night time would be editing instrumentals together and that became The League Unlimited Orchestra album [1982's Love And Dancing], which was also incredible to dance to in seedy gay nightclubs, which I also did [laughs]. I was then more aware of technology by this point and had been working in a recording studio with the TR-808 drum machine which, although a plastic instrument, seemed slightly paltry to the meaty sounds of the sampled bass and snare of Dare, which was the Linn LM-1. It sounded like a real drummer but obviously wasn't and was intrinsic to the sound of that album. My favourite was 'Love Action', not 'Don't You Want Me', which is always cited and is the most successful. 'Love Action' was always the one for me."

"It's another record that I grew up with. Whenever I listen to it I'm transported back into my bedroom when I was 16. Again, I love its mystery and how it doesn't let you know what it's about. It was hard to choose between this and Closer, and though there are some tracks on Closer that I really love, this did it for me, tracks like 'She's Lost Control' and 'New Dawn Fades'. I think it's a groundbreaking record, and I suppose like The Smiths, they became more relevant after they split up than when they were around. They inspired so much modern music and sound incredibly relevant now. If you heard Joy Division now in 2011 and had never heard them before, you wouldn't think it was dated. The production is great. There are lots of mistakes on there, it's really nicely under-produced. Even though there's this bleak, icy electronic feel to the music, it's not programmed or anything, it's very human."

"I always like when I hear something that I think is trend–setting. I believe that he’s inspired. I’m listening with the same ears that I listen to Stravinsky, Ligeti and Zappa with. What I’m hearing is someone with the ability to layer timbres and sounds on an electronic field in the same way that Stravinsky did as an orchestrator. My kids come home with all this dubstep stuff and I go to raves occasionally –not too much but I’ve been to a few, and a lot of that music is emulating everything else that’s around and it’s really good but it becomes insipid because it lacks a certain depth of vision. But listening to Skrillex I hear the layered quality of it although it isn’t exactly my favorite style of music. Things have dynamics, things have places bearing in mind what’s going on around them so that it doesn’t all just sound like a mess and I’m very impressed with it."

"This is another circumstantial choice from my long drive across America. Some of the tracks on this are twenty minutes long and perfect for a seven hour drive! It's good to have that time to let a song build and, because they are metronomic and electronic, it's great travelling music. There's a song called 'Patchwork' that Kliph played over and over again. It's maybe a portal into the records I've been listening to over the past decade, bands like Emeralds. I've got kids of various ages and records like these are compromise records because I can put them on to get them to sleep and I also like listening to them, though one baby didn't react to meditative music and I had to put on head-banging music to get them to sleep. I could head bang away! I listen to a lot of instrumental music in the house, loudly. I enjoy not having a voice to interfere with my day."