"ARE YOU KIDDING?! Magical Cloudz?! Majical Cloudz is two guys from Montreal and this record is only two years old. I bought it on a whim because I was intrigued by the strange spelling and a friend had seen them live and said that it was one of the most startling experiences of his life. I didn't listen to it immediately, but a couple of days after New Year's, I was feeling crushed, it was raining, I had it on my headphones and there was something so private and discreet about it. It's all to do with the lyrics and the singer; the music is very understated, there's no real progression in the songs. Unobtrusive, discreet backdrops for what it might feel like stumbling across an AA meeting or a domestic argument or reading someone's diary. There's a confessional, disarming honesty about his lyrics, they're poetic - there's some imagery that adds to the strangeness in a way, but when I listen to it, I feel like I have a companion in my head, the same as when you fall in love with a book. Of all the records that have recently come out, it's the only one I feel like I'll be in love with for a long time, it's very special to me."

"This song was a whole other cool factor for me. There was something so cool about it - the sound of it, the synthesiser and what he was singing about. It made such an impression on me, and I’m in love with Benjamin Orr’s vocal performance, it’s incredible. “A lot of these songs are based on vocal performances and guys that I idolise as having a vocal quality, but I also loved the guitar solo. It was the first solo I ever learned to play and it’s a pretty bitchin’, advanced, badass solo. It’s one of the best, so I was pretty stoked about it, but don’t ask me to play it today! I also learnt a bunch of Squeeze solos, Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford are two more of my favourites and the solo on ""Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)” is unbelievable. “With “Just What I Needed” it’s the solo because I’m a guitar player, the sound of it because I’m an engineer and producer and the lyrics because I’m a songwriter. People who aren’t musicians might be surprised by these songs, but they’ve had a big effect on me. I picked these songs based on being pivotal and this was one of those songs for many reasons. I’m still trying to write that song."

"""I think I fell in love with this record when I first heard 'Personal Jesus', which was a big single in the US. I love the sound of this record. There's no band playing live, rocking out in a room; you can tell that they're sitting in front of their keyboards or drum machine and making the record one finger at a time. Yet somehow it's got this amazing soul, with a clean technical sound and the vocals are so powerful. It's one of those records for me. I used to always put it on in the car, particularly when it was raining and I had to drive somewhere and the window wipers were going back and forth. Till this day, whenever I put that record on, that’s what I can immediately think of: driving in the rain and listening to that record over and over again. I dunno if the rest of Garbage would necessarily put Violator on but we were playing it backstage at one of the shows the other night and Shirley was singing along. I think she said, ""I always forget how much I love these guys, they're a guilty pleasure of mine"". The same could be said about Duke and Steve too but I’m probably the biggest fan."

"I think #3 would be The Empire Strikes Back. To me, clearly the best of the six, like way, way ahead of the field — the six Star Wars movies, not my list — and here we go, Harrison Ford again. Harrison Ford was like my generation’s greatest leading man. He’s going to be our Clark Gable or whatever. He was so good. That movie just had plenty of story and action, and my problem with a lot of sci-fi is that it’s all action and not enough story, not enough character development, and not enough relationships between the characters. It’s all shoot-em-up, which is good; I think guys like that. But I like my shoot-em-ups with relationships and character development and lots of story. And, you know, lots of snappy lines done really well by the actors. Another thing is, it’s the last Star Wars movie before the cute came in. And once they brought the cute, it was like “Ugh! It’s too cute!” They should have made six movies for adults and six movies for kids, and then everybody could have been happy. I’m going to get death threats now, for criticizing… I kid because I love! [laughs]"

"I didn't get into him at all for ages. For years and years I just thought, what is all the fuss about?' I just could not get into it. And then one day someone said: ""Have you listened to Hunky Dory?"". I hadn't checked that out at all. I really got into Hunky Dory. I transcribed and analysed nearly all the songs on it. I got into Low, and I quite like 'Heroes', and Scary Monsters. But there's a lot of stuff I don't like. I could probably list 10 Bowie songs that I think are amazing, and the rest of it I'm not too bothered about. I'm really obsessed with him as a character, as an artist. To me he's incredibly impressive and really exciting, his relentless drive to reinvent himself. Probably one of the most inspiring people I can think of. But musically, it's not quite as abundant. That last album: it's quite weird. I was really into Death Grips, he was really into Death Grips, and Kendrick Lamaar as well. It's an album that owes a lot to those guys, but then it's also got a saxophone player on it. This track 'Girl Loves Me', he uses the language from Clockwork Orange. It's just a brilliant idea."

"Obviously, I'd been listening to hip hop since the mid-80s and kept half an eye on all that stuff as it grew. I was involved in rave culture really early, Spiral Tribe raves and stuff like that and clubbing in Leeds in the early 90s. There was always this really hard UK Garage sound that was great. I loved it. Wiley's come from being a kind of garage MC, one of those guys we listened to on pirate radio in Leeds. He's still got that really underground sound, the way he spits and he never loses that energy either. I was listening to his first album the other day and it still sounds like the future to me. It sounds so contemporary. When you actually analyse grime rhythms, a lot of it is from Nubian rhythms and a lot of the scales are Nubian scales, Algerian scales. When you hear grime, it just sounds like someone's car in the street in London. But then you analyse it and you realise there's all these global influences - it sounds like the whole world. This is what I wanted Melt Yourself Down to be. I wanted to try and create a sound that felt like the whole world."

"This was the first record of his that I liked. I think it's really aggressive, in a good way, and hard. I always associated with Michael Jackson with all the Thriller stuff, which I didn't really like, but I thought this was a real step out from that safe zone that he'd been in. I'm not a Michael Jackson expert, but this is one of those records that you have to play really really loudly. The production on it is amazing. Apparently we did one of those award ceremonies, what are they called in the UK? The Brits. That's it. I was there with Alison [Moyet, Yazoo vocalist] and he was there and I don't really remember, because I was into not being starstruck, and Alison saw him and she leapt over the security guards and gave Michael Jackson a massive kiss, it was really funny. All the security guys were looking on going, "What the fuck was that?' I think there's a picture of us with all these really famous people like Paul McCartney, all lined up looking like geeks. I guess Dangerous was the closest he got, not to my style of production, but a more synthetic sound."

"With Neil Young, it’s all down to his songs. At least half of his songs really turn me on. Even the ones that don’t as much are still really damn good. It’s about getting onto the right wavelength. On this record, when I first heard it, I thought: ‘Ah, this is the big Neil Young, Dead Man soundtrack thing’. I love that sound but initially I was only tuned in to the shallower aspects of it. But after a while I started to really get the poignancy and the emotional voice that cuts through and thought: ‘Oh! I really love these songs.” I really respect what he’s trying to say. They’re beautiful songs. Sometimes Neil Young has a real ability to say something – to give a song an emotional stroke, to say ‘I love you’ or ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I don’t understand’, to express a human frailty. These older guys – Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Neil Young – when they make a good record as an older guy, they say shit. They might rhyme ‘moon with spoon in june’ but they do it with such heaviness, charm and humour. They drop these one liners that are like ‘Woah! That can only come from a guy who has been around the block 50 times.'"

"Tom Waits really brings a lot of showbiz into his records. It’s in there in the actual songwriting. He knows how to strip things down and get to some skeletal place that’s really strong. He’s trying to be true to his Jazz and his Blues. That is to be admired. There’s a lot of the textures you don’t hear so much. All that vocabulary is really seductive. I think that he’s a good songwriter whatever record you talk about of his. It’s not because there’s some fucking guy playing a saw. It’s like the Bruce Springsteen thing. It’s stripped down, universal, folky bluesy stuff. He’s trying to say: “You guys think you can change things overnight. Forget the new thing. What about Django Reinhart? Son House?” It’s like the Grand Duchy thing. People get obsessed with our production like, “What’s the new story?” It’s admirable when people say: “What about 1949, man?!” At first, I heard a cool White Stripes record and thought: “Who do you think you are, Robert Johnson?” And I get jealous. Fucking A! man. It’s like primal Led Zeppelin or something. But at the end of the day, I always end up respecting Jack White. [Black does an impression of the 'Seven Nation Army' riff.] Jack White has some believability."

"I used to work at HMV in Brighton and until that point I was still doggedly into electronica. This is a very specific memory but I remember reading something in The Guardian Guide about N.E.R.D., and I realised that these were the guys who’d been producing all the music on the radio that I thought was incredible. At HMV I had to order the album in myself, we weren’t stocking it, and it was kind of another moment for me, that realisation that you do not have to compromise, that production and good songs are not mutually exclusive. At the time I was listening to such complex music where every track had a different snare drum or a different sound, to listen to the N.E.R.D. record where every snare drum and keyboard sound is the same, there’s something insanely clever about that. It was a real moment for me in terms of realising that what interests me isn’t just the niche stuff. My production isn’t as advanced as theirs, but if you’re doing something that sounds interesting it’s pointless doing that if you can’t back it up with a song. That’s what I try and do, but I’m not as committed to the pop side of it as I could be."