"I was living in Cornwall just after art college and lots of mates back home in Cardiff were really getting into kosmische stuff. One mate sent me a tape of this album. Amon Düül were a radical commune band, something which seemed a pretty out-there idea when you're living in Falmouth. I love this album, it's so varied. It's got pastoral music and very hard psych stuff on there side by side. I heard this record before hearing bands like NEU! and Cluster; it helped me get into the fact that the German bands of that post-war era had a year zero which was very appealing – by disregarding American rock & roll they created these amazing new templates. As with so many of these records, I'm drawn in by the artwork. The sleeve for Wolf City is amazing. I found out years later from Andy Votel that they created the sleeve by taking a photograph of an image created by several slide projectors overlapping onto a wall. You'd spend ages trying to get that right in Photoshop."

"Sorry to pick this. Just saying the title's enough, really, isn't it? I know it's really obvious, but it's such a masterpiece. 

It's been strangely hard picking my albums for this, as lots of things don't resonate with me now like they used to when I was younger. I've been listening a lot more to classical and choral music in the last year, for example, but this fits in with that, because this is sacred music. It's music that transcends genre. Every track is profoundly beautiful – and I say that having liked Talk Talk before this, too. I remember the first album coming out at the same time as Duran Duran's Rio, and people comparing them, then hearing The Colour Of Spring. 'Life's What You Make It' was a big song when I was at sixth form. But this album… this is a bigger thing. I still love it so much.
"

"I remember hearing this when I was a little kid, I probably shouldn't have because it's lyrically so dirty. In the neighbourhood I grew up in every car would be driving by playing that record. Too Short is from Oakland California which is pretty close to where I grew up in the Bay Area. It was a local rap record in a way. I wanted to put a rap record in there because rap was such a huge influence on my youth. That is one that's probably less well known. It's very minimal, it must have been made on 808 and then there's the rapping. The way that he builds his vocals, he pretty much rapped the whole thing twice and then made it stereo, so it's got this kind of cool sound. I think he was one of the first people to do that. The lyrical content is really vulgar, but super fun to listen to. When I listen to rap today, well it's hard for me to say I'm a fan of rap music, the majority of it I don't like."