"Hip-hop has always been such a big thing for me, particularly hip-hop production. So many of my favourite producers growing up, and the reason why I wanted to make produced music, came from people like RZA, Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, Timbaland and early Neptunes, early Kanye even - and Madlib and J Dilla are both right up there. I picked these two albums [J Dilla's Donuts is also on the list] that came out on the same label and from the same scene rather than say, Illmatic, because at that point in my life there was a sense of like, no matter how much I liked Public Enemy or A Tribe Called Quest records, I was coming to them late. But I can remember Madvillainy leaking way in advance and thinking it was so exciting being there for it happening. I think it will be remembered as a classic record. I've got to know Madlib since then, which is amazing because he's an absolute hero. I'm coming to hip-hop more from a production point of view rather than listening to the MCing or the lyrics - that's because I produce music. But this is a record where the Doom part and the Madlib are so perfectly matched. It's like the greatest hits of beat producing - every track is completely insane. The way he cuts up the samples is so, so heavy! I think it's pretty much perfect. It's so eccentric. There aren't that many genres of music where eccentricity is embraced in the same way. This is a really, really weird record, but it's totally canonised as being a classic record. That's wonderful. Maybe in the same way Theo Parrish's music is - people embrace that weirdness, but there are other genres of music where they don't. The feeling I got when I made Swim - and it was a little revelation - was that if you asked your general public person about dance music they'd say it's all the same and formulaic, there's got to be a repetitive beat and blah blah blah. But the fact that there is a kind of repetitive rhythmic element is actually quite liberating - so long as it's got that framework you can do anything else on top of it. You don't necessarily have to have something that functions as a song. And hip-hop's the same thing - so long as there's a beat that moves you, the other things around it don't really matter, you can do what you like. You can have a sample of a Pakistani singer over the top or an old soul record or even just random drum machine hits firing off all over the place - there's a crazy variety of things Madlib does when he's producing. But because it still makes your head nod, you can leave that area and be more free."

"I find that many albums by The Beatles don't completely hold together for me. While Sgt. Pepper's… holds together stylistically, it isn't one of my favourite albums. However, I have to include The Beatles, because they are clearly the greatest band that ever stalked the earth. I got into the Love album to introduce my son to The Beatles. George Martin lovingly remastered it and I think he has made some improvements. Sonically it is fantastic. It flows. I love being able to go across their entire span of history. I went to the Love Cirque De Soleil show in Las Vegas, which was a bad idea, but this record is a fantastic introduction and became my son's understanding of The Beatles. The other records are well worth investigating, of course, and they made truly great records, but there aren't any that could go in my Baker's Dozen. The album contains 'A Day In The Life', which is in my top five greatest songs. I love the fact it was created through such a mad, collaborative technique. One part is John, one part is Paul and they left a minute-and-a-half to fill with something. What fucking amazing, arrogant craziness could do that? And, to then produce one of the greatest songs. That song is akin to how James write to a degree. We write through improvisation. No one takes anything into a room. We start improvising and the improvisation may take ten minutes or it may take 90 minutes. We record it all and then whoever wants to can take a track, chop it up in whatever way they want to, and then present it back to the band. Someone else can then input and add a keyboard line or whatever. Therefore, we have this collaborative process that you can hear on the new album that is a little insane, as we might have had a part, which worked in the first ten minutes, and then we might try and weld it to something that worked hours later. They don't necessarily join and we have to find a way of joining them. That acceptance of chance can lead to the best moments. Most bands have one or two songwriters (we now have four) and they are at the mercy of their conscious ability. With us, a chaotic reaction to each other is creating the song, which is probably why we have been around for 33 years and we never get bored. We never know what the fuck we are going to do next. The Beatles had that on their greatest collaborative songs, where they couldn't be sure quite where a song was going. They allowed themselves the possibility of fucking songs up in a great way. The Beatles are the Shakespeare of our time. They will still be played in 100 years' time and people will still wonder how the fuck they made such amazing music."

"Christy Moore is one of my mum’s favourite artists and I listened to this so much growing up. He had a record, Live at the Point, which we would always listen to on journeys around Ireland and Irish music was the first music I experienced live. My mum was born in Dublin, we would go to Galway and go in taverns all the time and it soundtracked my childhood. “I just recently fell in love and ‘Black is the Colour’ was the song that I really liked and listening to it recently I felt like I was like inside romance. I was like, ‘Ah, I’m so in love right now’ [laughs]. I’ve been quite starved of romance for a really long time and I felt I was in it. I was ‘God, this is so romantic and this is just kind of fucking insane’. I’d forgotten the importance of it and how much I wanted it, so that’s why I put the song in here. “If you get the Live at the Point version, at the beginning he says that he’d heard this beautiful song by this guy and at the end he’s ‘gimme that song!’ He wants it and I love that, that’s so cute - that’s what this is about, it’s sharing stories. Christy Moore heard this guy sing this beautiful song and he’s ‘Come on, give it to me, I want to play that tune, I want people to feel that way’ and how beautiful is that? “I’m Irish, so folk is my origin, sharing songs, telling stories and someone else passing on that story. I’ve been really looking into folklore in the past year, that’s one of the reasons that I really wanted to go to Ireland because I was ‘I need to find a record that’s related to this, this is my culture and this is where I grew up.’ As a kid I played the tin whistle and the Bodhrán. I was winning trophies for Irish dancing, I spent my holidays there and I went around playing in fucking fields with cows. And yeah, I’ve been researching fairies and mythology, I love it so much. “There’s so much ancient, beautiful, really respected and protected traditional stuff in Ireland. The traditional aspect can be so cool, there’s so many amazing musicians that just go down to the pub and play and it’s like breathing to them. I stayed in this little hotel with eight rooms in a town called Kilkee, it was in a bay, it was so cute and there was a family playing music in the pub. There was an eight year old boy just staring off, he was playing the accordion and it was so natural - just a bored eight year old that is a fucking genius and has no idea. And then if someone sang an old traditional song a cappella, everyone in the pub would go silent. It was like a movie or something."