"My entry into Gong would've been the Camembert Electrique album, which I bought for 50p or something like that. A lot of people at school had that record and, in fact, my first entry into being in a band at school was a band that just did Gong cover versions. It was an interesting education as I was dabbling around on an electric violin, and what with all those interesting time signatures. We did a street party for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977 and just played Gong covers! Later, down the line, one of the guys who was in the band became a member of Gong in the 80s, a guy called Graham Clark, and we got to the know them quite well. We were that much of a bunch of fanboys that we would make our way into the dressing room. There was a point when Gong founder Daevid Allen was playing with Here And Now, which was like this festival-type band, and every time they came to Manchester they let us play on stage using their instruments. We had this group called Danny And The Dressmakers and we'd play the worst noise you could possibly play; it was like an anti-band. We went on tour with Here And Now in a converted ambulance and did three gigs with them. And so we built a strong allegiance to the brand of Gong, which has carried on throughout my life. We also performed at the Gong Family Unconvention in Amsterdam at the Melkweg many years later, and Daevid Allen stayed at my house a few times. He was a very interesting character and proper musical melting pot in terms of where he comes from. I picked Angel's Egg because it's when the band was still experimenting. There are tracks here that are real improv, while others are really composed. There are tracks where certain members take a lead on it. They recently put a box set called Love From Planet Gong and listening to the re-mastered version of Angel's Egg, it occurred to me that this music couldn't be dreamed up in most people's imaginations. It's a fascinating record."

"It’s a record that always puts me in a good mood whenever I play it. Loved The Kinks when I was a kid and I learnt how to play guitar by learning from a Kinks songbook. I think if you are learning to play acoustic guitar, then The Kinks are a great place to start. Ray Davies makes the songs sound deceptively simple. There’s elements that are coming from blues or music hall or whatever, but he tends to modulate the chord progressions in really weird, unpredictable ways that are so fresh on the ears when you hear them even now all these years later you think, ""How did you come up with that?"", but at the same time they also had these pure pop melodies over the top as well. He didn’t sound like he was a smart-arse, he sounds like he has a very lateral imagination and also quite unconsidered as well in the way he must have written those songs. You can imagine him sitting there thinking, “I’m going to try this one now”. You can explain it in terms of music theory and it would sound complex, but he was “Why don’t I try this?” Dave Davies is also a total star of this record: there’s a couple of really good songs like 'Death Of A Clown' is on this record too. 'Waterloo Sunset' is on here, as is 'David Watts' and so you have those classic Ray Davies songs about social observation, but my favourite song on the album is 'Two Sisters', and it’s about two sisters, one who has this mundane life who is jealous of the other one who has this carefree existence, and I might be reading too much into it but I sometimes wonder if it was ""Raymond looking in his washing machine"". I don’t know these guys, but I get the sense that Dave was a bit wild and Ray had a family at that time, and that the two sisters were in fact two brothers. It also has this heartbreaking melancholia running through it which I think The Kinks capture so well, like very few bands can. It’s saturated with a sweet melancholia, and I think that song captures it."

"I believe this track had a lot of political resonance in the late ‘70s. I don’t know what the impact was at the time, because I was too young - I would’ve been about seven years old. It’s so articulate and compelling; it’s one of the most powerful pieces of lyricism to have come out of the twentieth century. “One of the biggest clichés that I despise is when guys who write lyrics for their band describe themselves as poets - it’s usually the most absurd affectation. With Linton Kwesi Johnson though, you have the opposite, a genuine poet who is putting his words to music. It’s really powerful sonically, too - Dennis Bovell’s production is astonishing and the record just really kicks. The words aren’t just believable, but completely empathetic. When he’s describing blows raining down on his friend and his reaction, it’s like you’re there with him. It’s like stepping into a movie or a really good book and watching the hero right in front of you. Very few songs pull that off as well as this one does. “I’d always listened to reggae growing up, but I didn’t hear this song until I was nineteen or twenty. I shared a flat, for a long time, with a guy from Ghana who was a big Linton Kwesi fan, and it was him who played me the record first. When I was growing up in the ‘80s, the Afro-Caribbean community in Britain didn’t really have much of a voice in the general media, so this record still felt relevant ten or fifteen years later when I finally heard it. “I was just talking to my sister the other day about the racism we saw going on at school. We went to the same one, this really ordinary comprehensive in Glasgow, she’s ten years younger than me and yet we saw similar things. It wasn’t even casual racism - it was often really active racism through which people identified themselves. There were school desks with NF scrawled on them, and some of the language that was thrown about was pretty appalling. It made this song all the more powerful when I first discovered it."

"There was a record store in the Times Square subway station, and another one on 42nd Street, both of which had big “international sections,” as they called it. It included everything from the rest of the world, all on vinyl, but with no information. You’d look at the cover and go, What’s this like? It was a total crapshoot. But occasionally, I’d hear something that would blow my mind, like a Fela Kuti record; the first one I picked up was called Expensive Shit, and obviously I picked that up because of the title. The covers were the best—like Cambodian pop records with a bunch of people in traditional garb, all holding electric guitars—and you’d look at them for clues. You’d think, What in the world could that be? You’d buy it, and it would be pretty cool. In 1986, I did a fiction film called True Stories. I guess you would call it a musical comedy. We were doing the mixing in San Francisco, so I’d go down to the big Tower Records on North Beach and go to the international section. One day, I came back with a whole bunch of Brazilian records, because I had maybe heard of a couple of the artists, but didn’t really know what their records were like. One was a Caetano Veloso record called Muito, and then there was a Milton Nascimento record, and probably a Gilberto Gil record, and those blew my mind. They had elements that were psychedelic and that had a Brazilian feel. They were really beautiful, but then I dug a little bit more and found out they were also really political. These guys had been exiled, thrown in jail. I was connecting with it, and I realized that my generation didn’t know any of this music. So I asked our record label, “Can we license this music, and can I make a compilation of my favorite cuts?” That one record led to another one: There was a Brazilian series, then a Cuban series, because Cuban music had not been available in the United States for decades. And I started my own label, Luaka Bop."

"We've been playing The Soft Bulletin live, and you have to consider that chain of events where you make a record but then you have to become the people who play it in front of people. When I saw The Who play live in 1977, that was really a moment that changed music for me; it was no longer music, it was like a deeply religious power to me. They were still doing these songs from Tommy, in a sense like they were on Live At Leeds, where it was just utter chaos, [and] utter release. And even though people would say that at the time that I saw them they weren't at the peak of their powers, they were powerful enough on this night. That was a life-changing, fucking devastating couple of hours of music. I walked out there like I'd changed heads. And it's like that on Live At Leeds. They start to discover that psychic energy: they're feeding off each other's energy, looking at each other, listening to each other, letting that be the reason the songs sounded the way they did. And that's hard to do, to be an intuitive musician - you have to surrender and say yeah, it's like this, and that's a motherfucker, what if it sucks? You have to trust that you have it in you. So when I hear Live At Leeds I'm always reminded that these are young guys, they didn't know that they were playing at their peak, they were just playing what they felt like playing. And the way that the volume goes up, and the way they even lose themselves - the playing is so intense that they even lose the tempo - but they leave that in the record and that's what's music's about. It's not just something that's kept in time, it's people making a racket. Fuck, sometimes it's out of control. There's moments like that on 'Magic Bus' or 'My Generation', moments in those jams that I think are some of the greatest moments of that type of rock & roll. There's that invisible energy guiding them through this. In 1970 you probably had not heard music like that ever.]"

"This is a project from Ben Wallers and Alastair Mackinven from Country Teasers. We moved in similar circles in the mid-90s. I saw them do the whole of this at the Moth Club earlier this year. You could think 'oh what a funny idea to cover the whole of Pink Floyd's The Wall', but they actually did it really well. I used to be a Pink Floyd fan, and one of the first albums I bought was Dark Side Of The Moon, but The Wall is where I parted company with them, I thought it was just a self-indulgent mess. So I was amazed to go and see that they'd actually made it palatable, they'd done something interesting with it. I know it's not coming from a take the piss point of view, Ben's got an actual affection for that record, and they'd really thought it out. The Wall is one of the most indulgent, over-produced records ever done, and so the idea of two guys on a stage at the Moth Club doing it is like 'how the fuck are you going to do that? Where's the choir, where's all this?' But it worked, it was really good. I preferred their version of The Wall to the Floyd one. I remember going to see the film version of The Wall, and Bob Geldof played the main character, and it was so rubbish and painful, the worst kind of that rock star moaning about nothing in particular. There's something in that record to do with a performer's relationship with an audience that's interesting - there is something strange about getting up on a stage and performing in front of people. In Ben's live performances as The Country Teasers or The Rebel, sometimes people think he's trying to wind the audience up or whatever, but it's always important that the audience is there and you're never allowed to be a passive spectator. I don't know if that's why he finds [this album] an interesting thing to deal with, but you could tell that there's a reason for it, it wasn't just 'let's try and do something ridiculous'. "