"“I’m starting with The Beatles because they were the band that got me into music in the first place, and I’ve chosen Revolver because it’s the point where it all gets a bit more sort of heavy and druggy, with Tomorrow Never Knows being the perfect example. “That’s a song that Ride played right from the first rehearsals and we still play it occasionally now. Revolver’s got a lot of guitar sounds that I still reference when I make records. It’s very bass-light and it’s very high-end-light, as well. It’s all middle with varying degrees of mids and high-mids. “That’s something that I know Noel Gallagher has always been into. He realised that if you take out the really low-end, you get more volume overall, so you can concentrate this loudness in the middle where all the guitars are operating. It’s like using guitar-playing as a production tool…"

"Fred Hersch is a hugely respected jazz pianist who was diagnosed HIV-positive in the 80s. He didn't talk about it publicly until the 90s. Then in 2008, he got very ill, and fell into a coma, which he stayed in for two months. When he came round he'd lost all his muscle memory, which is obviously devastating when you're a jazz pianist. So he had to learn to play again. This record was only made three years later, unbelievably.

I find this album very emotional. It's partly the music, which is very beautiful, but it's partly about what he went through. Having had a heavy hospital experience myself, I know how that can affect you. I managed to get a contact for Fred after he made this, and I wrote to him to tell him how much it had moved me. We wrote to each other for a while after that, which was really special."

"Most of the albums I’ve chosen are from the 1970s – they are ones that moulded my style. So, Wishbone Ash invented twin harmony guitars in heavy rock [they were also a huge influence on Iron Maiden]. I used to go and see them when they played in Leeds or Sheffield or Barnsley – they were on circuit a lot in the early 70s. I was a bass player then, and they had a great bass player [Martin Turner] with a good style, with really cool vocal harmonies. Argus felt groundbreaking – it was a big explosion of rock and Wishbone Ash were a pretty loud band. It was a good grounding for me to learn their songs - this particular album is a concept album so you learned the whole thing. That’s how songs get into your psyche. In Saxon we used the twin guitar harmonies occasionally – we don’t want to copy anybody, but it is a theme, it is in there."

"Kurt Cobain talked about punk a lot even though everyone spoke about Nirvana being a grunge band, which I found quite confusing at the time. So I asked a friend of mine’s uncle about what punk was and I went out and got the first Clash record and the Sex Pistols. I was kind of into that, and then the '90s American skate punk thing arrived in my life. It’s a complex record, but it’s a really fun, poppy record at the same time Green Day and The Offspring were the gateway bands and I got heavily into NOFX, Pennywise and all that stuff, but the record that really sticks with me is Everything Sucks. It’s fast, it’s hard, it’s heavy but it’s also melodic as well. It’s a complex record, but it’s a really fun, poppy record at the same time. I listened to it yesterday. It’s a masterpiece of punk rock. It was my gateway into underground punk rock"