"I'd agree that they were ahead of their time, they were quite minimalist really. Minimal electronic music. When I heard the b-side of 'Electricity', which was a track called 'Almost', that was like hearing Simon & Garfunkel, only in an electronic world. The songs were really simple, there was heaps of emotion in that particular track. It was a record that everybody had in my group, and we all played it at parties and danced to it. I say 'dance', I am not Saturday Night Fever, I'm working on it. I'm trying to break the moonwalk at the moment. 'Electricity', I didn't know what it was about, it just sounded really really exciting. They were a prog rock band in the old days apparently. I was telling the keyboard player about my admiration for 'Almost' and he said, "Yeah that was one of our old prog rock songs, there were seven people in the band"."

"I just love that record. I love the early Stranglers. The bass always sounds so good. It just drives everything. It's almost the lead instrument. The Stranglers were such a weird band. They've got this sort of Rick Wakeman-esque classical keyboard going all over the place but sometimes, like on Black And White, it's more synthesiser stuff which is cool. It's got my favourite Stranglers songs on it culminating in the last song 'Enough Time'. I think that's just a brutal and great song. I love 'The Tank', 'Toiler On The Sea', 'Do You Wanna', 'Sweden (All Quiet On The Eastern Front)', 'Outside Tokyo' the whole thing about the watches with a strap to sell is really funny. 'Nice 'N' Sleazy' has a really great groove. The bad pun bugs me a little bit but it's still pretty great. Rattus Norvegicus was a great record too, but No More Heroes, of the first three albums, seems the weakest. Or maybe it's the one I haven't listened to as much. Black and White just feels more brutal than the first two records."

"I used to work at HMV in Brighton and until that point I was still doggedly into electronica. This is a very specific memory but I remember reading something in The Guardian Guide about N.E.R.D., and I realised that these were the guys who’d been producing all the music on the radio that I thought was incredible. At HMV I had to order the album in myself, we weren’t stocking it, and it was kind of another moment for me, that realisation that you do not have to compromise, that production and good songs are not mutually exclusive. At the time I was listening to such complex music where every track had a different snare drum or a different sound, to listen to the N.E.R.D. record where every snare drum and keyboard sound is the same, there’s something insanely clever about that. It was a real moment for me in terms of realising that what interests me isn’t just the niche stuff. My production isn’t as advanced as theirs, but if you’re doing something that sounds interesting it’s pointless doing that if you can’t back it up with a song. That’s what I try and do, but I’m not as committed to the pop side of it as I could be."

"This was the record that sold me on that band. When I lived in Sacramento California I lived right next door to this little club called the Press Club, and they were playing there. I was sitting on my porch and their van pulled up and I started talking to them. That was when they were touring that record, and it was my favourite record at that time. It's heavy, but it has a lot of groove to it - I don't know if there were too many groups who were doing that kind of riff rock, but it had all these discord sounds to it, and then two bass players, one of them using distortion the whole time and the other guy holding down the low end, the keyboard player playing vibes. It didn't sound like anything else at the time. They were from DC, where a lot of my favourite bands are from, like Fugazi, Minor Threat, these bands who started a lot of scenes in music. I never got too into political rock and roll, obviously great lyrics are great lyrics, but what grabs me is the cadence of the singer, how they choose to deliver the words. And that dude, he had this raspy voice, this distinct voice, to me it was more sex, he has this loungy kind of vibe. Lyrically he seemed to talk about partying, drugs, and girls."

"Nineties hip-hop has never been bettered for me. I kind of lost interest in the eighties when electro started morphing into hip-hop. It got a bit clunky for me as it tried to sound more real, it sounded clumsier. By the time you get to the nineties, you had a mutation of what's real. The production on The Infamous – sonically it's just genius. It's a shame some of the lyrics are so offensive as it detracts from how good the music is. It's brilliant soundtrack music – it carries on the thread for me of the stomach knot for me, from John Carpenter. I don't know why they were so quick to move on from the sound of The Infamous. I suppose the royalties thing is huge in hip-hop, now everybody buys an off-the-shelf keyboard and has a stab at it to avoid having to clear samples. But it doesn't sound the same. It was hard to pick one. When I got ousted from The Verve in 1995, I stumbled on Tical by Method Man. That's definitely my favourite Wu-Tang record, probably because it was my first. The production doesn't bear any relation to anything I'd heard before. You could draw a parallel with Tom Waits – it's from another world really. That one needed perseverance as well. It sounds shit at first, but then it reveals itself."

"This is just double bass, drums and some kind of keyboard at some point. I chose this album for the opening track. The rest of the album is alright, but it sounds a bit dated. The opening track though is great. The start with the saxophone, or whatever it is, is quite dark, and then it teases with the synths. I used to have it on and think, ""Oh, this is fucking great."" This came out in 1996. I was living with a guy who bought it. I would have never have bought it but he was a bit of a fashionista, you know. I was living in Nottingham. I had split up with my girlfriend and was lodging with this guy. He bought it and I got really into it, this album and Photek, which I chose as well. They started to get my mind thinking about electronica, although Red Snapper was essentially a live act, to me it sounded like electronica, all instrumental. He asked me to do some singing for him, the guy from Red Snapper. But I couldn't do it. He wanted me to do one song and I said I could do it, and then he said ideally he wanted me to do two and I was like, ""Hold on, come on."" I just didn't have the time, I said I'd have to let him down. Though the stuff he sent me over was quite good."

"I think I came across this record because it was produced by Dave Fridmann and I was interested in him at the time because of other stuff he’d done, particularly The Flaming Lips. I heard this record and asked other people about it and they were saying, 'Aren’t they kind of folksy?' And I was like, 'No! What? Have you not listened to them?' Because this album does have that quiet, acoustic thing at the heart of it, but Fridmann has produced it like In Utero or something. Almost all of the instruments are pushing at the top of the range and it gives this really weird feeling of a loud quiet band. This song ‘Cue The Strings’ has this kind of crappy, wind-up string sound, that sounds like it’s been recorded onto tape a hundred times with two voices singing over it. That’s all that’s in it. But you get this feeling as it goes on that it’s absolutely massive and it’s hard to describe why, but I think it’s something to do with that production, the way it’s just biting at the distortion level. It’s got this swelling feeling that’s like the sun rising and that matches the lyric; 'Here comes the cold sunshine.' You get the feeling of being on a planet that has no atmosphere and when the sun rises you’re going to get burned up. It feels like such a huge sound but it’s really only two voices and a keyboard. I think that’s a great example of the power of production."

"This is another great example of repetition, something simple and small that carries a huge resonance. There’s that line he keeps repeating: 'Don’t give up, 2000 man.' That whole record has got this incredible apocalyptic feel and the scene they paint over and over again is one of Earth covered in detritus from this era that’s become obsolete; something happened to humans and now all their crap is left everywhere, their computer keyboards and so on. “I’ve used that idea six times in my own band: the title ‘Qwerty Finger’ is about a qwerty keyboard that washes up on a beach and at the end of ‘NASA Is On Your Side’ you’ve got children climbing over fridges. It’s because that imagery is so powerful and I don’t think anyone really went there again. “I kind of believe that will happen and I don’t know if I believe it because of Grandaddy or because it’s a rational thing to think, but I do and I do still believe that our time will pass and all of our technology and crap will come to nothing. That’s a big influence for a band to have on a little boy I think. “This song is probably the best one on there and the way it just keeps on going is incredible, both in terms of its length and that churning message: 'Don’t give up'. It made me feel that I was the start of life around that age, the ‘2000 man’ and that’s very powerful stuff if you hit the right kid at the right time."

"We walk every morning down to the sea and along the coast, and every third or fourth morning we stop at the Real Patisserie. We were buying some bread in there and this music came on, so I shazamed it and it was the single, 'Clear', from this album. Matty is the best of a whole group of artists in North America who are drinking very heavily from the fountain of early 70s music, especially relating to George Harrison, Emitt Rhodes and biggest of all, Todd Rundgren. Now I've been a Todd Rundgren fan for a zillion years, and there was a point in the middle of the last decade when I realised that musical recycling is kind of okay as long as you're not doing it exactly the same. I could mention some other artists like Mild High Club and Drugdealer: they're not slavishly trying to make records that sound like they were made in the early 70s, but it's the same harmonic world, and I'm very much a harmonic world kind of person. That's how I hear music. The song 'Clear' touches on things that I just love, and the album didn't disappoint; there were four or five really good tracks on there. And then I was in the Small Batch coffee shop and this music came on and I thought what's that, that's great, and it was another track from the Matty album. I was like, wow, that guy's cool. He's the keyboard player in Badbadnotgood, who I don't know anything about apart from the name, and the fact that it's a really stupid name as well."