"London Calling is probably my favourite rock record of all time. It’s incredibly powerful and diverse, it’s social, political and has all sorts of musical genres - punk, rock, ska, ballads, jazz and dub - rolled into the song arrangements. The Clash were at their peak when they made it and the kick-off track is the most anthemic song they ever wrote. It’s got everything, brilliant lyrics, a brilliant performance, it just sounds killer and Mick Jones’ guitar playing is phenomenal, when you hear that guitar riff it’s like a fire alarm going off. ‘London Calling’ is like a call to arms, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up every time I hear it, it’s that powerful. I went to see them on that tour at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago and it was absolutely rammed. The second they started playing the entire room started jumping up and down and I thought the building was going to collapse, you could feel the whole place shaking. It was an old theatre and I was watching from the balcony, thinking we should maybe get to a safer location but I became so immersed in the music I forgot about it, it was a fantastic show. There were obviously differences between the British and US punk bands and some of that is in the sound of the records. The British records had a bit of a darker sound to them and that could be due to technical stuff in the mastering, but a lot of it had to do with the performances. To me, the British bands have always been ground-breaking, as a whole there were better new wave and punk bands coming out of the UK than the US, it was like the second British invasion. There was a great scene in New York, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Television and Blondie were ground-breaking at the time, but England, a country with a much smaller population than the US, had a larger percentage of iconic bands from that era."

"Well, I grew up in the sixties. In 1962, I bought the first Rolling Stones single, and I still have it. I still have every single they released, in order, right up until Brian Jones was murdered. I saw Pink Floyd god knows how many times, and even did a couple of light shows for them... We started listening to pirate radio and John Peel’s Perfumed Garden, and had a friend at school called Spidey who was very good at spotting interesting new music. John Peel was the first person to play The Velvet Underground, and Spidey said, “Listen to this, you’re gonna love this!”. That’s when we got the first violin. We used to go to Birmingham, to this tiny little record shop that had nothing of interest except some Albert Ayler and free jazz. There was a record in there, and we recognised the artwork from Oz magazine so we knew it was by Hapshash and The Coloured Coat, because they used to do psychedelic posters and Oz. So we bought it just because of that. It was on Magnet Records. When we pulled out [the disc], we were shocked to see that it was on red vinyl, which we’d never seen before. We later discovered that all these people on the scene in London wanted to raise money for the legals fees of John “Hoppy” Hopkins, the first person who’d been busted for drugs and who co-founded the International Times. He was a real mover and shaker of the times. It’s like twenty to a hundred people high on acid jamming! We fell in love with it and still listen to it all the time. When we DJ, people come up to us and ask, “What was that with that great riff?” Guess what one of them ended up doing? Writing “We Are The Wombles”! That really got me in the head, that was worse than a bad acid trip!"

"It’s in my top five list of best films ever made. I just think it’s perfect. It’s an amazing portrait of an artist, an amazing portrait of a family, Crumb is an incredible central character. I feel like whenever I watch that movie — I sort of watch it every couple years — I start talking like him afterwards. I mean he really infects me in a way that totally changes the way that I look at the world. All great artists have that sort of ability. When I read some of my favorite novelists after I put down one of their books, I’m thinking in their words. I’m seeing the world through their eyes and it’s the same with Crumb. I’m a big fan of his comics, but that film does such an amazing job putting you kind of in his headspace. It also looks amazing, it’s shot on film, Zwigoff does an incredible job framing Crumb’s world, and the Jazz music. it’s just great, I just think it’s great. I think the movie’s a pleasure to watch. I mean, his brother Charles is f—ing incredible, man. Like, the idea that this family produced not one great artist, three great artists. And that Crumb was actually the one who was political enough and sophisticated enough and just barely enough of a people person that his art got seen. But, you know, Charles and Matt also were like really pushing the boundaries of the stuff and also hugely influential on Crumb’s stuff. You don’t get Robert without Charles. You just never sort of have access to those stories the way that this documentary has access to that family. It’s a lot to think about, the artwork that we end up getting as a culture, you know, often times is less about what’s better, and more about how savvy the artist is and how able they are to kind of be in the right place at the right time so that there’s an audience for the work."

"I didn't know much about Sly and I'd only heard the two hits that he'd had, which were 'Everyday People', which I loved because of that bass line which goes all the way through without changing once, and 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)', and I loved them but I didn't think that much of them. Then one evening in 1971 I was round the house of this bunch of London musos who I'd kind of fallen in with and they were all sort of jazz-influenced people. They used to smoke a lot of grass. I didn't, but the room was full of enough stuff to probably affect me. They were all talking about this album and how it set the scene for something totally new, and I was interested because they were the very serious people who were into Coltrane and Charlie Parker, yet this was a pop record. It's so sketchy, the whole thing, it hardly holds together. It's like little flicks of paint. Instead of an organised composition, it's just people throwing in these little touches and somehow it coheres. It's like the first time I saw a Jackson Pollock or something. Another interesting thing about this is I had just started experimenting with rhythm boxes, which were considered completely beyond the pale by most musicians. They had like six rhythms on: bossa nova, Latin, rock & roll... something like that, and they had these terrible sounds [mimics rhythm box] but I really liked them and I was starting to write things over them, and everyone was asking me, ""Well, you'll replace that, won't you?"" and I said, ""Actually, I don't think I will."" Then I heard this (first track, 'In Time'), where one is playing alongside Andy Newmark, one of the great drummers of all time. But there's nothing really holding it together except the rhythm box."

"I was introduced to this in 2009 by a friend of mine who is into super-heavy music and it’s one of his favourite guitar records. I’d never heard early era Fleetwood Mac and I still don’t know many people who talk about it. “It’s from Then Play On, I think it was the last one they did with Peter Green and Danny Kirwan, there was always a rotating cast of characters in that band, people coming in, freaking out and losing their minds. “I chose this because in the process of discovering Peter Green’s early music the touch he had as a guitar player was just like magic. I feel as a singer and a guitar player he’s become one of my favourite ever players, there’s certain kinds of tricks he did, especially on this song, that I’ve definitely ripped off, not the blues playing but this incredible soulfulness on guitar. “I’m not in love with guitar playing, even when I was really into jazz I never liked guitar players, I didn’t care about it that much really. I’ve always wanted to approach the guitar from a perspective outside of just playing the guitar and trying to make it do things that the guitar can’t really do or pretending it’s something else. “But Peter Green was one of these straight-up, incredible, super-expressive guitar players. He’s not the first name a lot of people talk about because it wasn’t always the most original music, but this song in particular is so specific to what they were trying to do at the time. They were starting to leave pure blues, it has this strange composition going on and the way it progresses isn’t super-standard, it wasn’t psychedelic exactly, it was edging into a world of music that was happening outside of blues at the time. “Peter Green is such a soulful player, he has a unique quality I’ve never heard anywhere else."

"Night of the Living Dead was one I saw with my dad. I was 18 years old. It scared the s— out of me. I think my dad and I had to sleep together that night. [laughs] I said, “No, that’s it. I don’t care how big I am!” And what I loved about it, too, was how [George] Romero could just take this film, and do it clearly on a budget, and yet make it work, have this sort of tongue-in-cheek humor with it. So part of what, I think, attracted me to the films I mentioned was not just the films themselves, but how they were made, what they meant politically, on all levels. I’m attracted to all those films that, in a way, engaged us across cultures. So, you look at Night of the Living Dead and you put these people in the 1960s in this pressure cooker, and one of them is the black guy, one of them is the white guy, one of them is the chick, and the brother and sister, and you see what happens. The unspoken subtext of it was huge. It was huge, it was revolutionary. Mutiny on the Bounty was the same thing. And even in films like Redemption Road, where I’ll take the black guy, and he’s the one who’s into country and western, and the white guy, he’s the one who’s into blues, and both of them, along the way, are going to encounter music that informs their personal narrative, and it also informs the musicality of the film. So, along the way they pick up some blues, some gospel, some jazz, and that feeds into the song they play at the end of the movie, the sort of redemptive song. So I think those movies actually speak to what I’m attracted to in film. I just like something that, on some level, even if it’s a horror film, is interesting and redemptive and makes you think."

"Again, Jesse turned me onto that record, years ago. We revisited that when we were in the desert at Rancho De La Luna, we were playing lots of good stuff on YouTube through the mixing board. The house was so cool. David Catching, who lives there, he was out on tour - great guy, but we had the whole house to ourselves. Just that record - throw it on in the daytime and then the sun starts coming and you're in this chill house and you're just cranking this record and then eventually when the sun starts going down, that's just super psychedelic. It was a good companion piece. That record has Leon Thomas singing ""the creator has a master plan"" over and over again. Never thought about this at the time, but repeating lines in a spiritual way - there's a title track to b'lieve i'm goin down…, which isn't on the album, which is just the same line over and over again - something about that spiritual vibe. Eventually Leon Thomas just does this spiritual yodelling! The record's so melodic. Pharoah Sanders does this cool thing - it's like pop, but it's like spiritual pop, mixed with jazz, where it's a relatively simple line, just a couple of chords, usually. It just puts you in this zone, it's so beautiful. It's simple, but not at all; nobody could touch it. Pharoah Sanders comes in eventually and plays the sweetest emotional sax and eventually it turns into insanity, noise, skronking and screeching. Honestly, he's known for that, but it's my least favourite part of him. I understand why he does it, because it reaches this climax and then all of a sudden, you come out and go back to this thing and it just goes all the way to the limit; it's just like life, it goes from zero to 60 and then you come back out of it. That's the beauty of him."