"It’s funny, this list, I’ve actually met a lot of the people I’ve chosen! Rufus came on tour with us in 2003, it was the first time we’d got on a tour bus and the first iPods had come out. Tim had an iPod, and I checked it out, I put it on and the album he had on there was Want One and I was completely blown away. He sounds a bit like Radiohead-does-classical, particularly on that record. I remember saying to him that he sounds a lot like Radiohead and he was a bit like, “Really?”, I don’t think he even knew their music. That album was written, I think, during the time he got clean from being really addicted to crystal meth. I mean it sent him blind and stuff, it was really serious. So the album tells that story, with just beautiful songwriting, and I don’t know if he ever got close to that album again in terms of song-writing, it’s such a phenomenal record. And I like orchestral arrangements if they’re done well, or else it can sound like Il Divo or something but he did it so well, mixing pop and classical."

"I guess you could pick any one album of their mid- to late-period, especially Revolver or Rubber Soul. This was very much discovered as a teenager, their story, their music, the feeling of a slight sense of ownership. I don’t like that, in a way, because I hate it when people feel that they kind of own our songs as a band! But anyway, anyone’s who’s grown up with The Beatles feels that sense of, “They’re mine!”. But Sgt. Pepper's… is just mind-bending as to how ambitious it is and also what their energy must have been like and the scene they were occupying. I wish that existed now; unfortunately it just doesn’t. There was a kind of innocence to that time that doesn’t exist now, it was a time when great pop music... you... you still had to try. I think one of my big problems with music today, with a lot of the pop music that’s out there, don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of great music, but most of what the general population listen to or are exposed to is really kind of mindless or soulless and music can do so much more for you as a human being."

"Peter Sellers movies, I would have to have in on him. I’m tempted by Being There. Again, one of his more serious things, but a beautifully attenuated performance I thought he did in that. I haven’t seen the movie for a long time. I’m always nervous about saying, “Oh, that was a brilliant movie,” if you haven’t seen them for 15 years or 20 years, because you may go back to them now and think, “Oh, ah, well actually, it’s not great.” Or at least, “It’s got those great bits that I remember, but there’s a lot of stuff in between that is very unimpressive.” But I seem to remember the only thing that really spoiled it — and it was very much the fashion at the time — was the sort of bloopers edit over the end credits. And I thought that movie in particular did not suit and did not need shots of Peter Sellers cracking up. But obviously the producers or the distributors said, “Look, it’s a Peter Sellers movie and it hasn’t got a lot of laughs in it. Can we just stick something silly in the end?” And that is what they did, and it didn’t completely ruin the film, but it came very, very close, in my opinion."

"Like I mentioned I love the desert. I have a video somewhere of my wife and I listening to this record driving in Joshua Tree. It really does sound like how it looks. To be honest, I knew of the soundtrack long before I saw the film. And that's how it is for me with a lot of Morricone scores. I went through a deep Morricone phase in my twenties, and just any soundtrack he ever did I bought. The movie's already there – you can see it. And I bet he would agree too – a lot of his music is far more cinematic than the films he's actually scored. He has this intense visual element to his music which is always exciting to hear. So that record in particular, I remember I first heard it in my twenties and it really blew my mind. The production – the fact that it is so produced – sure it's a recording from the 60s or something. But it is a studio album. So you hear him getting really great sounding recordings in some old-school microphone (old-school now). Really getting such a rich, beautiful sound. And then you get that fuzz effect, which is just quintessential Morricone sound, probably because of this record."

"I love Brian Eno, but I picked this album specifically because it's one of those albums that if you're up at six in the morning, stressed out wondering why you were up all night, I can just put this on and everything feels OK. It's almost superficial because it's so sweet and ambient, but I respect it a lot because it always piques my interest. I know he wrote some of the songs with Robert Wyatt from Soft Machine, and Robert Wyatt has this delicate, fragile sort of energy, I feel like that's there. An old friend of mine, Yuka Honda from Cibo Matto, the first band I was in, first played this to me on vinyl in the mid-90s. I was smoking a lot of pot in those days. I've read that Eno made it with the intention of actually playing it in airports. For fun I have put it on [in an airport] and there is something quite airporty about it… something machine-like about the melody. It reminds me of the architecture of an airport, it's not bustling or busy, it's like an airport when no one's there. I think it's the number one album I'd recommend for taking a bath to."

"Around the time that this album was released I was driving my car and I heard 'Man In The Box' [from 1990's Facelift] playing on the radio. To me it sounded like another style of music that was completely out of the leftfield. The incredible combination of Layne [Staley]'s voice and Jerry [Cantrell, guitarist] is just so cool. They were making music like a lot of these bands that was getting played on the radio, and even today in America you need to have songs that can make it onto the radio. They knew that, and they got played all the time. Their vibe was entirely different to KoЯn, and KoЯn's was entirely different to Nirvana, who were in turn different to Pantera. All of these bands were coming out at the same time but they were all making their own unique impressions. It's incredible really. If you look at the history of rock & roll, the beginning of that decade was one of the most exciting times. There was never really anyone with a similar vocal style to Layne though, and that's important too. I think a lot of it is always down to the singer to some extent."

"I didn't get into him at all for ages. For years and years I just thought, what is all the fuss about?' I just could not get into it. And then one day someone said: ""Have you listened to Hunky Dory?"". I hadn't checked that out at all. I really got into Hunky Dory. I transcribed and analysed nearly all the songs on it. I got into Low, and I quite like 'Heroes', and Scary Monsters. But there's a lot of stuff I don't like. I could probably list 10 Bowie songs that I think are amazing, and the rest of it I'm not too bothered about. I'm really obsessed with him as a character, as an artist. To me he's incredibly impressive and really exciting, his relentless drive to reinvent himself. Probably one of the most inspiring people I can think of. But musically, it's not quite as abundant. That last album: it's quite weird. I was really into Death Grips, he was really into Death Grips, and Kendrick Lamaar as well. It's an album that owes a lot to those guys, but then it's also got a saxophone player on it. This track 'Girl Loves Me', he uses the language from Clockwork Orange. It's just a brilliant idea."

"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."