"Obviously, I'd been listening to hip hop since the mid-80s and kept half an eye on all that stuff as it grew. I was involved in rave culture really early, Spiral Tribe raves and stuff like that and clubbing in Leeds in the early 90s. There was always this really hard UK Garage sound that was great. I loved it. Wiley's come from being a kind of garage MC, one of those guys we listened to on pirate radio in Leeds. He's still got that really underground sound, the way he spits and he never loses that energy either. I was listening to his first album the other day and it still sounds like the future to me. It sounds so contemporary. When you actually analyse grime rhythms, a lot of it is from Nubian rhythms and a lot of the scales are Nubian scales, Algerian scales. When you hear grime, it just sounds like someone's car in the street in London. But then you analyse it and you realise there's all these global influences - it sounds like the whole world. This is what I wanted Melt Yourself Down to be. I wanted to try and create a sound that felt like the whole world."

"Would Betty Davis have been famous if she hadn't married Miles Davis? Well, is Betty Davis famous? Because it didn't really work; at the time, it put people off, because she was married to Miles Davis - "Oh, she's his missus, she's just bloody flaunting it. I'm not buying a bloody record by her". You can dress it up how you like, be raunchy and using sex to sell it and everything, but it didn't really work. So I think she may have been more successful if she wasn't married to Miles Davis, because it isn't anything like him. Some of her other records are a bit crap, a bit hit and miss in places, but this one reminds me of Grace Jones: it's got a lot of soul, and it gets a really good groove going, and she just does her thing over the top of it. A lot of funk used to give me a headache, but this has a few parallels with Captain Beefheart; it reminds me of Clear Spot-era Beefheart. I knew of Betty Davis at the time, in the 70s, and I completely dismissed her because it gave me a headache, but now I've rediscovered her. And she's brilliant."

"And then, I guess, The Sting is the next one I gotta say. This was for me, and probably for a lot of people, at least of our generation, our first exposure to con men movies was from The Sting. It really holds up. Like a lot of the movies on this list, it holds up because of the central relationship, because of the Newman-Redford thing. Watching those two guys together, even though at this point, plotwise, I would be fairly… Well, I don’t know. I wonder, if someone saw The Sting clean for the first time today, now with all the movies that have imitated it in the years since, whether anyone would actually kind of say “Oh my God” at the end of it. I don’t know, but I don’t know that it would matter, because I think the fun of the film is in the game playing, and specifically in the way that these two guys play off of each other. It seems like something that’s particularly vulnerable, just because of the twist, the nature of the end. But like I said, that’s not really what makes the movie tick, oddly enough. It holds up just as a really fun ride."

"Tom Waits really brings a lot of showbiz into his records. It’s in there in the actual songwriting. He knows how to strip things down and get to some skeletal place that’s really strong. He’s trying to be true to his Jazz and his Blues. That is to be admired. There’s a lot of the textures you don’t hear so much. All that vocabulary is really seductive. I think that he’s a good songwriter whatever record you talk about of his. It’s not because there’s some fucking guy playing a saw. It’s like the Bruce Springsteen thing. It’s stripped down, universal, folky bluesy stuff. He’s trying to say: “You guys think you can change things overnight. Forget the new thing. What about Django Reinhart? Son House?” It’s like the Grand Duchy thing. People get obsessed with our production like, “What’s the new story?” It’s admirable when people say: “What about 1949, man?!” At first, I heard a cool White Stripes record and thought: “Who do you think you are, Robert Johnson?” And I get jealous. Fucking A! man. It’s like primal Led Zeppelin or something. But at the end of the day, I always end up respecting Jack White. [Black does an impression of the 'Seven Nation Army' riff.] Jack White has some believability."

"The reason why I love this album is because I was a little older, I was in sixth grade. What really made this album incredible was the production. This was the first time I started really taking notice of the production on an album. I knew the beats on All Eyez On Me were incredible, but it was the first I said, ‘Damn, there’s a lot of live bass on this album. There’s a lot of live guitar.’ Everything had a sound, and it’s some of his deepest material front to back. ""Collectively, from ‘Hail Mary’ to ‘Krazy’ to ‘Against All Odds,’ it’s deep. This album gets better for me as time goes on. Me Against The World is like that too, but Makaveli is really the one where the older I get, the more of it I get. Every year that I get older, I hear this album differently. I know more about life, so I’m like, ‘Oh shit, this is what he meant.’ So Makaveli is super special. I could talk about that album all day. It was the percussion value, in terms of it sounding tight and live and jazzy in a sense, and his deepest lyrics"

"Led Zeppelin, goddamn! I don't think they made a bad record! There's that classic line from Cameron Crowe's movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High where they're cruising around, talking about how to get chicks. And the guy says: ""If you wanna score with a chick, turn out side two of volume four!"" I've used that a few times actually. It works [laughs]! Anyway if it didn't work, it was a nice soundtrack while it was going down. Jimmy Page is another guitar player that means a lot to me. Every member of that fucking band: John Paul Jones was an amazing writer, arranger and producer, as well as Jimmy. Plus John Bonham and Robert Plant... that's one of the greatest rock & roll bands of all times. It's just straight-up, fucking sexy, kick ass and shit, man! All the way from dirty low-down rock & roll to the biggest orchestral tracks like ‘Kashmir’. They travelled a lot of ground while keeping their roots intact, the blues. You know, certain bands really resonate in certain areas and that was one band that was always popular up there where I come from, the Northwest. You have at least ten fucking Zeppelin songs that you can jam with anybody at any time."