"That came out in 1988 when Ride was starting to happen. Mark and I had gone to art school, we’d met Steve, met Loz and - as a band - we got into a lot of American stuff like Dinosaur Jr., Screaming Trees and Sonic Youth. “Sonic Youth were on a real run of great albums there with EVOL and Sister but Daydream Nation was their peak and their sort of White Album for me. It changed my life and my playing with the open tunings, theguitar abuse with screwdrivers and slides, the long jams, the headspace and just the whole sprawl of it. It was like the Pete Townshend thing but taken a few steps further.”"

"Again, the cover is incredible, her stance is so powerful. I didn’t realise when I first heard it, but a lot of the songs were actually covers, and yet, because her voice is so characterful and commanding, anything that she sings just suddenly sounds like a Grace Jones record. I love the musicianship on Nightclubbing, I love the interplay between the instruments, and it just feels like a really original-sounding record. It was actually quite an influence on me on my latest album—this idea that you know your voice should be this commanding force that just makes everything else sound like it falls into line because your voice is so dominant."

"This might not be an album that people celebrate, but to me, the combination of Phil Spector and Leonard Cohen worked really well. His lyrics are so deeply poetic that you sometimes don’t know what he’s talking about, but it doesn’t matter because they’re beautiful. “It’s a very humanistic record. The stories are very eloquent and touching, and the melodies are very rich. I love the fact that all the songs are unbelievably slow, too. It’s an unusual-sounding record. His voice has changed a lot over the years, but on this record he’s really trying to sing. It sounds like he’s straining, but that’s OK because it sort of adds to the drama."

"This is such a great record, and it's so overlooked. It's sneered on, too. It's got some really great jazz musicians on it, doing such brilliant, subtle performances. And the lyrics are fantastic. Listen to 'I'd Do It For Your Love': "The sting of reason/The splash of tears/The Northern and the Southern Hemispheres/Love emerges and it disappears." How great is that? 

This record was played a lot when I was growing up, so it's one of those records I've taken with me. I also love the story of what Paul Simon said when it won the Grammy for Best Album: "I'd just like to thank Stevie Wonder for not releasing anything this year."

"A lot of people didn’t like it, but I loved Steven Soderbergh’s remake of the Russian film Solaris from the minute I saw it. I like it more than the original. I never paid too much attention to soundtrack music before that, but as soon as I heard that one in the theater I was just like, “What the fuck is this?” If you looked at my iTunes playlist, this soundtrack might be the most played album on my computer. It’s like experimental ambient music that still really involves your emotions. You could draw a line from this soundtrack to “The Ghost of You Lingers” from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, which came out around this time."

"I first song I remember loving had to be ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?’ by Culture Club and so I guess I figured out I was an emo pretty early on in my life! But I really just connected with that song when I was a kid. For one, I was taken back by this man’s look, is that a girl or a boy? I was intrigued at that moment, but the song itself is a really good song. A lot of Culture Club’s music had sort of a reggae feel to it and at that point I had never heard reggae music and it sort of felt other-worldly in a way."