"I picked this mainly because most people are probably familiar with the regular three studio records that came out. I would hope they are. This record, Hendrix In The West, is a compilation of live versions. I think four songs are from this San Diego show in 1969 and shortly after that tour Noel Redding was out of the band so it was the last part of the Experience. There's a version of 'Spanish Castle Magic' on the record that is just so incredible, and the bass is distorted and driving. That song alone is worth the whole record. And if you can get your hands on it, there's actually a bootleg of that whole San Diego show and I recommend that, but Hendrix In The West is a little more accessible. My friend Darren who was the drummer in Mr. Epp, we were in high school and he had one of those portable eight-track players. I think he pretty much only had three eight-tracks I can remember, and one was Jimi Hendrix's Smash Hits and another was The Who: Live At Leeds and we would play those constantly. I've always been really impressed by Mitch Mitchell's drumming. It spoke to me. I think he's maybe the best drummer in rock & roll. I just love that kind of loose, fluid feel. It's not stiff, there's sort of a jazz thing going through it. It's really propulsive. Have you ever seen 'Message To Love', the Isle of Wight set that Hendrix plays? It's weird what happened to Mitch Mitchell over the years he was playing with Hendrix. In the early days he's sitting upright and playing like he does on the records but by that almost last performance he's got a double kick drum which he's just slumped over and his back is hunched and he's really low. It's like he isn't playing the beats at all, he's just playing around it. It's like he's become a rock version of Elvin Jones - it's crazy. Rock & roll has taken its toll on a lot of people. There's a bit in the Isle of Wight thing where a couple of songs in, Hendrix just goes behind the speakers and you can hear his guitar hitting shit. And he comes back out and he's on fire. The song ends and he says "I just woke up two minutes ago!" I was like: "Gee, I wonder what he was doing back there?""

"That one was quite deep for me because again, growing up in church and being a believer; my family being from the West Indies - my mum’s side from Jamaica, my dad’s side from Dominica - I remember going to church and it was authentic West Indians there in their 40s, 50s that now live in the UK but have kept these traditions, they were singing these songs just without the drums. So when I first heard this, something just went - ‘Hang on?’ I remember being four and hearing this person sing that song but swap Selassie for this or that. It had that same spiritual element I was so used to, just in a very different form. It was like a weird full circle thing for me. It was almost like going back home. These drums are taking me somewhere, but also I'm being carried by these songs I know. It was beautiful to check out more of what Count Ossie was doing and people that were part of his band like Cedric Brooks. He was infusing a lot of the jazz elements that he's hearing from Coltrane or Ornette Coleman. That's deep, you’re deep in the heels of Kingston, aware of Ornette and them man. Like Duke Ellington had to come and visit him, you know, there’s a photo of him and Duke Ellington in the bush. You know he's got something that's important, not only important for culture but it's spiritually important for the Nyabinghi tradition. For me when I heard that record, particularly Grounation, where they’re going through loops for 20 minutes, it’s that thing again with soundsystems where you ‘wheel up a riddim’ or at church when the tune would just keep going. It was something I’d never heard but I also felt like it wasn’t foreign, those experiences are so wicked and that influenced the whole fascination with drum culture and drum languages, spirituality connected to drums, music orientated around the drums. I got into Batá and music for the Orishas and things that are all over the Diaspora in West Africa, the Caribbean, South America. And when you listen to it, the recording’s so rags but it just couldn't work if you put it in Abbey Road. It gave me a bit more confidence when I was doing my record that if I go to someone’s house and I show up with a handheld recorder, as long as it feels right it doesn't matter. Big studio, small studio, my phone as long as it’s got that feeling that I was going for."

"They famously reformed last year and I've seen them a couple of times and played on the same bill with them. One of my great regrets was that I came to this album a couple of years after it came out and my friends had all been to the show when they came through town and I missed it. It felt like a concert I should have been at. Part of it was that I hated guitar bands. In high school I was into terrible progressive rock like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes, while all my friends were into Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth. I always thought I was in the right and it was them who was barking up the wrong tree, which subsequently has made me a little bit embarrassed, because it was the 90s - I should've been listening to Sonic Youth. But I was firmly committed against guitar music and it was the same friends, like Ryan [Smith] - who's in my band now playing guitar and keyboards and other stuff, and who's been my friend since I was 11 or 12 - who was the guy in the Dinosaur Jr. T-shirt trying to get me to play organ chords in the background for his band, and I was grumbling away, ""When the fuck do I get my solo?"" And he introduced me to Neutral Milk Hotel. It's kind of an obvious way in for me, because it very much has that sound - the spiritual free jazz and the horns and the power and the instruments from around the world, different bagpipe kind of instruments - for me, it has that same spirit and wildness. It's also one of those albums, like the Pharoah Sanders, where the songs are all essentially the same song. And I don't mean that to diminish the achievement of this record because I think it's amazing, but when you have a record where you listen to the first song and the melody is so elemental to me - it's like it existed before this album was written - and then later on you hear another song and it's the same melody but inverted. Not in a technical sense, but you get the impression that these songs all come from the same tree and I love that. That's one of the things that the album format can do - tie things together like that. I've done that myself consciously on my records in the past - reprised a melody. On Our Love there are two songs that are essentially the same song revisited - 'All I Ever Need' and 'Your Love Will Set You Free'. Not the melody, but the underlying riff and the harmony."

"In 1962/3 German promoters Fritz Rau and Horst Lippmann booked a number of American blues and jazz artists to come over to tour Europe [The American Folk Blues Festival]. It was kind of the first time these blues musicians weren’t playing places like the south side of Chicago for $25 a night. They were playing in Europe’s finest concert halls to an audience that listened spellbound to every nuance and every word of a language they didn’t understand, from a people whose colour they didn’t understand and whose musical history they didn’t understand. They were enraptured by the emotion and individuality of these different blues musicians. So as a 16-year-old I went to the Manchester Free Trade Hall to see one of these shows, and one of the characters who stood out for me was J.B. Lenoir. He was alone on stage with an acoustic guitar and sang songs in this amazing bell-like high tenor that was quite unlike most of his compatriots, and he made a great impact on me. In the same year I heard him singing ‘Alabama Blues’ and was later given by Rau an album they recorded with Lenoir of the same name, repackaged and remarketed today as Passionate Blues. ‘Alabama Blues’ was the album’s key track, a very brave song for a black man to sing in 1963, with the race riots, lynch mobs, bombs and brutality. Almost the only clarion voice of protest and political awareness I was aware of was J.B. Lenoir. He sang about Vietnam, he sang about the wars in the street, he sang about police and the lynch mobs, and he did so in a very articulate and responsible way – he wasn’t a rabble-rouser. He reflected what was going on and how it impacted on him and his life, if not in an uncomplaining way, certainly not in a vitriolic way. When we think about it these are perfect sentiments for the blues. I heard some really rather tiresome man on breakfast television this morning, Michael Buble I think it was, talking about his latest single. He took great pains to explain how it was about the break-up of a relationship and said, “all my songs are about being in love or out of love, that’s what I do.” I thought to myself: “How incredibly interesting. Not.” How incredibly dull and boring, but it’s the stuff of so much. Shakespeare’s sonnets probably should have got it out of the system for planet earth and its population for all time. I don’t have a problem with a good love song but very few of them are, they’re really incredibly trite and employ the same tiresome, limiting vocabulary and expressions. It’s almost as if people’s brains can only go as far as their gonads. J.B. Lenoir proved that you can be passionate about the lynchings in Alabama. That’s the stuff we need to know about and blues, simple and direct and emotionless as it is, is the perfect form for that."

"I found a very interesting thing out about Tony Allen. I was thinking, ""How did he get to that music?"" In my opinion, Afrobeat really grew out of his drumming more than anything else. I mean, Fela was of course totally important to it and realised what you could build around that, but I think there was nothing else you could find that sounds like Tony at that time. So I was asking a friend of mine about this, Joe Boyd, the record producer, and he said that the story with Tony was that he was the only subscriber to Downbeat magazine in West Africa when he was about 18 or 19. In one edition there was a supplement by Max Roach, the jazz drummer, about hi-hat technique and Tony got completely fascinated by this article about how you balance the hi-hat with the rest of the kit. So Tony came from the history of Nigerian drumming and then he saw this article by Max Roach and that was the sort of thing that galvanised him really. Afrodisiac has four songs and they're all absolutely brilliant. There's no disappointment on the album at all. On later records there's quite a lot of fat, the pieces go on and on and sometimes they're a bit aimless, but Afrodisiac I suppose was being made as an attempt to push Fela over here, so instead of a piece taking a whole side it takes only half a side. I used to go to this record shop just off Tottenham Court Road called Sterns and that was a place where you could buy records from other countries, so a lot of Africans went there because you could buy West African records there. I used to sniff around there as I was just fascinated by all the covers. All these people with amazing headdresses on and you think, ""Christ, I really want to hear that record, I wonder what that sounds like."" So I saw that cover and bought it entirely on that. I thought, that sounds good, it's got the cheesiest title you could have. I took it home and just thought, fuck, the vigour of it and the Nigerian strength [laughs], the rudeness of it. The horns, when I heard them, I had this picture of these huge trucks on the Trans-African Highway and they have these enormous compressed air horns and that is what the horns on the record sounded like to me. They were so un-glamourised. They didn't have that kind of 'jazzy' soft, smoochy sound, they were just ""fucking get out of my fucking way!"" When I first met Talking Heads, the first meeting I ever had with them, they had been playing in London and they came over to my flat to talk about me working on their next album. So I said, ""This is the future of music"", and I played them Afrodisiac, and to their credit they were incredibly impressed by it. If you listen to the third album we did together (Remain In Light) it's so influenced by that. It's sort of shameful in a way."

"Loudon Wainwright III's Grown Man—it's hard to narrow down to any one album, but that album is important as far as when it came along in my life. And it's a classic Loudon album. I was shooting a movie in North Carolina. It was the first movie I did where I had a larger role, a movie with Sandra Bullock called 28 Days. It was about rehab. Viggo Mortensen was also in it and Margo Martindale and Steve Buscemi, and Loudon Wainwright, who's role was "Guitar Guy." I wind up going to set every day in a van sitting next to him. He didn't say anything, and I didn't have anything to say to him. We were just quietly going to work. So there was another actress named Susan Krebs, who's also a jazz singer, who was in the movie, and her and I got along. And Susan and I were talking about music all the time, because she's a singer and I love music. And one day she's like, "Do you know who Loudon Wainwright is?" And I don't. I have no idea. And she's like, "Come by my room. I have his new album. I'll play it for you." And she played Grown Man. And I was blown away. It was the perfect kind of music for me. He's a troubadour. He's a poet. The way that he uses language. He just does that thing with my brain where it just gives me glee and joy. I become that annoying guy going, "Back up, back up. Listen to the words. Listen to what he just said. You gotta hear how he says it. He coulda-said-this-but-he-didn't-he-said-that." So I after that first listen I went out to a music store, which used to exist before the Internet, and bought six other albums. And of course the next day when I sat in the van next to Loudon I'm like, "So, ha ha, Loudon. Alan Tudyk. Good to meet you. Uh, can we talk a little bit about Grown Man real quick?" He was very patient with me and talked through everything. I had a relationship that was kind of starting to fray at the edges. And most of Grown Man is about relationships under duress. On the album there's this song "Dreaming," which is one of his best songs I think ever. He actually played it in the movie as "Guitar Guy." It starts out "I'd rather be dreaming than living..." And it just resonated with me. When Loudon was on set playing this song live he sat in a hallway. I was not in the scene, so I didn't get to be on set, but he was right by a door that had a grate. Because we were filming in a rehab facility the door had this vent, like a fence on the bottom half of it. So I'm lying on the floor on the other side of that door just listening to him sing this song over and over and over again. I mean, come on. That's fucking special."

"When she did the video of 'Rehab', I thought 'Jesus, what is that?' - again, that initial thing... I thought, 'shit, she sounds tremendous, who is this kid?' And it looked great, and the arrangement was great and the whole package was great, and I had to get the album. So I got the CD and it just got better and better. You hear her getting into the ballad, 'Love Is A Losing Game' - that's like a standard, that comes from a jazz standard, something one of the old jazzers would have done, that's how good that is. She nails the shit out if it. The whole album is tremendous, and it's just a shame - making an album like that and then nothing. The band I take on the road with me is the same brass section that she used to use. So when she died, we were in France and I saw it on BBC news, and I came down to the bar that night and I said 'my God, how did that happen? She must have thought she was indestructible', and they said the opposite - she had loved living on the edge apparently, it was that thing of danger, that's what they felt. I wish I'd met her and had a chance to sing with her because she had a lot to offer, and she had a great spirit and what she sang was tremendous. I would have loved to duet. When you record something was somebody, it lasts forever, and if you haven't, it's a shame. It's a shame that it [drug addiction] happened to her so early. With Whitney Houston, she's left a wealth of material to listen to, but Amy Winehouse, I know she did an album before that, but Back To Black is tremendous, you just think 'shit!' Just waiting for the next, and now there is no next and it's a bloody shame. The drug thing, it never appealed to me. Sniffing cocaine, I know what it does. For singers, it's death - it gets on your vocal chords, it's bad news. Burns your bloody nose out. I've never taken any drugs. The only thing I took was at the beginning, purple hearts, because I was doing so many shows and I was getting tired. I think it was Viv Prince, who used to be a drummer with The Pretty Things, who said, 'try one of these, that'll keep you awake', but then I realised you couldn't go to sleep! So that was a short-lived thing. And I'll take a sleeping pill when I've got to go to sleep and I know I need to get up, but mild ones, nothing heavy, because I don't want anything to get in the way of what I do. And when I've gone a little too far drinking and I think 'oh shit, I've got to get up tomorrow', then you see it, and you think 'you fucking idiot! You stretched it too far last night'. So you do that enough times and you learn, but some people don't learn."