"When I was growing up, hip-hop was pretty new. My oldest brother was really into it. Also, we had MTV from about 1990 onwards, so you'd see all these different people - A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy and Gang Starr - just became a soundtrack to whatever we were doing. I picked that one because I love DJ Premier's production, but also Guru's voice. I'm a big fan of the experimentation within hip-hop. Nowadays, people feel hip-hop has gone mainstream or whatever, but at that time, people were making records that were sampling very out there, experimental music, but combining them with parts from classical or jazz recordings, resulting in this very dense collage of sounds that is at times not even very melodic, but it's always got an amazing groove to it. It was those aspects in combination with Guru's voice, I just found it really inventive and exciting. Also, I would listen to it, and want to know where the samples had come from, and then I would go on missions to try and track things down. I think there was a Monk Higgins sample used on the track, 'Code Of The Streets', and that's just very alien-sounding. It's very basic, but it uses this beautiful violin part all the way through the track. They must have just been listening to such a wide variety of music, and what they've come out with is much more interesting that what came out post that era of hip-hop. You get some songs where there's a whole song taken, with just new lyrics added on. Back then though, there would have been as many as forty songs sampled in one song sometimes."

"Old Rottenhat is an album that came out in 1985, and Works In Progress is an EP from the same time. They get grouped together on a compilation album called Mid-Eighties. On that album, he's using a lot more synthesiser, and a lot less acoustic and jazz instrumentation. I heard that when I was working at Domino where I used to work a few years ago, and it was just on in the office. I'd heard plenty of other Robert Wyatt but this was the stuff that I liked the most. I liked the combination of his very frail, beautiful voice mixed with properly 80s-sounding synthesisers. I like the claustrophobic sound, and the reverbs, and the synths. They're not nasty-sounding synths. For me, it's just very colourful-sounding music. I got to work with him more recently with Hot Chip, because we were such fans, and it was a real pleasure to be in the studio with him. He gave a lot of himself to the project, and came up with some amazing parts to add to our tracks. He would sing one song of mine, but he wouldn't sing another because he needed them to feel like something he had lived. I have to feel like stuff resonates with me. I liked his honesty, and what he bought to those recordings was amazing. There's a lot to learn from him - he's very political, and I'm not like that at all. And one of the things he was doing when he made Old Rottenhat was creating lyrics that nobody could misunderstand, in terms of political meaning. I was impressed by him not hiding anything, and that's something I like to do with my music in terms of the emotional content."

"If this list was only five albums long, this would definitely be on there. It's so incomparably good. I think spiritual jazz coming out of America in the late 60s and early 70s is my favourite music in the world. It has everything - big melodies, big production ideas, a heavy kind of rhythm, a really wide palette of sound, so you get that kaleidoscopic playground kind of feel because the texture is so dense and interesting… I guess it's funny how much it shouldn't connect with me because I'm an atheist, but so much of the music on this list is explicitly spiritual music. There was a Brian Eno Red Bull lecture, and Kieran was there and he asked him this very question: ""Why is it that so much of my favourite music is spiritual music?"" and Brian Eno's answer was pretty good. It's about that sense of release, disposing of your ego, and opening yourself up to be more receptive to different musical ideas. I don't mean that you're receiving some kind of spiritual energy - at least that's not my take on it - I just mean you push aside considerations of ego and being cool, maybe that's what it is. This record just seems elemental. It seems to have come from somewhere deep down and really says something about being human. Music means so much to me, it's so central to my life, and the music of Pharoah Sanders is so committed to the potential of music - what music can do, what it can say and how it can communicate with people. It's in no way cynical. It's inevitably going to resonate with me, because I believe in music so much."

"Again, this song is totally inspiring from a production point of view. It’s hard to choose just one song from Les Paul and Mary Ford, but this stood out. It’s a great song, despite not being a Les Paul and Mary Ford original. When people think of Les Paul they tend to think of the guitar the Gibson Les Paul, but Les Paul basically invented multi-track recording and a lot of recording techniques that so many of us use today. The stuff that he did on ‘How High The Moon’ and anything from the early ‘50s is just so, so far ahead of its time. It’s all guitar, even the drums are just him tapping his guitar and not in a cheesy, Newton Faulkner kind of way, it’s serious musicality. He was basically recording in hotel rooms, using bathrooms as echo chambers and the like. The arrangement on this track is crazy. It is a bit silly, a lot of the stuff sounds silly because it’s all plinky-plonk, all very high-pitched, mandolin-like guitars, but you’ve got to remember this was in the ‘50s. It makes Rock ‘n’ Roll, which was often just three chords, sound very unimaginative. This kind of track was jazz chords and guitar orchestra, basically. I’ve definitely robbed some of Les Paul’s techniques over the last few years. On the new record there’s some sped-up guitar, half-time drums and things like that, where you basically slow down the tape and create a whole different instrument almost. If you haven’t seen [the Les Paul documentary] Chasing Sound, I highly recommend it. It’s about how he invented the first electric guitar, using a telephone microphone and putting it on a bit of old railway track, putting and stretching a string across it and amplifying it. That was literally the birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll."

"Donald Fagen's solo album is another of those albums that kind of teaches you what it is to be a songwriter. I feel like Donald Fagen did Aja for the musicians, and The Nightfly is for the songwriter. It's very much a concentrated idea. I remember getting turned on to this album by my home girl at the time; she was very much a muso. I would spend a lot of time listening to Steely Dan, and I didn't connect the dots – sometimes you don't connect them on your own. I had to be somewhere between 18 and 22 – somewhere in those years – she played me that album and I remember again, whenever I heard somebody create progressional music that are not normal choices, it always would perk my ears up, if it was somebody that would tastefully do something different or make some really outlandish choices, and Donald Fagen is the king of that. The Nightfly is one of those albums that I can't live without, that is where I come from as a songwriter. That again definitively is what created the songwriter in me, as compared to the bass player. The choice of the covers, the jazz covers, they feel like they were his songs, the way that he's playing them on the album – he made them real special. It was like it told his actual story of who he was, and I feel like that's the way you're supposed to play standards, not the part where you just learn it because it's cool. I think that there's some emotional connection that Donald Fagen had to these songs that he chose, along with the ones that he wrote on this album, and you can feel it. You can feel it. You can feel it. The Nightfly is a definitive album for me."