"We liked Free – very bluesy, with a lot of soul. There was a time when there was this thing called Freemania, when they were the biggest thing since sliced bread. They were a bit Led Zeppelinish – brilliant musicians, and Paul Rodgers was a white guy who sounded black. They were all great at what they did. This album didn’t influence me so much, but it influenced the band the other guys were in, Sob. They named the band after this album. They were a very bluesy outfit before Paul Quinn and I joined the band and it became Son of a Bitch, then Saxon – our old band, Coast, was more proggy. So this album became part of my listening cycle."

"My wife and I had moved back to Britain in 1992 and we were interested in every kind of electronic music. Before we left, we knew people that worked for R&S Records, and they brought around the first white label of Aphex Twin’s Digeridoo. We were just blown away by it. At the time, the space opened up for a lot of small labels like ours [Swim ~]. What was great about that world was that anybody could do it. You didn’t have to be British or American. That’s the great thing about the Boredom Is Deep and Mysterious compilation, which I was introduced to by a journalist. It was all Danish artists and it has the splendidly named Dub Tractor and Double Muffled Dolphin."

"They were on Casablanca Records. They were the yin to Kiss’s yang. Kiss were dressed up in black and Angel were in white. They had this remarkable guitar player called Punky Meadows who Frank Zappa actually made fun of in songs. But he had some remarkable songs like Tower and Any Way You Want. They were almost proggish to a degree, but really great songs. I always wondered about doing a cover of the song Tower. The singer had this really weird voice. You have to be super open-minded to appreciate it because he has such a super-fast vibrato, and a lot of people won’t find that appealing. But they were one of my favourite bands growing up."

"I was a John Peel listener like anyone who had any taste, any lonely soul - there were a lot of us and it was great when we all got together. He played this. I'd never heard anything like it. It was around that period after the Mexico Olympics and the Black Power protest and to this day, surely, this must be the first hip-hop record, not in terms of its music composition but in terms of the content. Everything is there. It is supreme. I wanted to know more about it, so I went out and bought some books - Soul On Ice, Seize The Time, all those things. That's really powerful. John was never quite as bumbling as he liked people to think."