"Well everything’s been said about it, hasn’t it? Again, it was around the same time as Bring It On. I went out to South Africa for a gap year to work on a school. It was just as I was starting to smoke weed, it was exciting, and there were no responsibilities in life. I remember we didn’t have a music system out there, we had no money and a mate of mine went and bought a cassette player, it was a single deck cassette player, with terrible tinny speakers, but I had copied a tape of OK Computer before leaving! I don’t think I played any other album for about a year, it was on permanent rotation. What I found so compelling about it was that you can’t hear a single thing this guy’s singing! He has this real slurred delivery with every song and it was just an assault on the brain in terms of the production and the instrumentation and it was all coming through this terrible little tape player in South Africa! I thought I’d figured out what I thought the lyrics were and, largely, a lot of them were wrong, but I didn’t have the inlay card so I didn’t know! I just remember this haze of completely falling in love with the sound of this record and what I thought were the words. They really summed up the way a lot of people felt at the time, the alienation and the fear of a quickly changing world, all the pre-millennium stuff. It summed up the world that I occupied. It’s why it’s still the greatest album that I think has been put out in my lifetime; they're a band who, at that point, reached their songwriting peak, and [Thom Yorke]’s never got there since as far as I’m concerned. They were still young enough to have that punky quality but old enough to have those ballads that leave you feeling quite cold like 'Lucky' and 'No Surprises'. At that time, we were all just desperate to be Radiohead, everyone had the same set-ups and the same guitars! I can’t listen to it anymore though - as a band, if you’re influenced too much by one thing, as we were, it can kind of stifle you."

"Number three would be a Ken Loach film. I love Ken Loach very much because I love what he stands for politically. I love his bravery and I love the way that he really wanted to get these very socio-economic stories and real examinations of society in England and the unfairness of it. I think the way that he can manage to do that and make films that are entertaining as well, means that he’s such a master. He did a film in 1993 called Raining Stones. It’s one of my favorite Ken Loach films, and it’s one of my favorite films in general. It’s a heartbreaking story about an unemployed man who has to scrape together the money for his daughter’s first Communion dress, because in the society that they live in, that’s quite an important thing. You have to have a new dress for Communion. It’s about the dignity of trying to find the money and not letting her go to this event with a secondhand dress. It’s about how people who would seem to be on the fringes of society and treated with a lot of contempt by a lot of conventional media — it’s an examination of how they do have moral compasses. They are human beings, and they do abide by a set of rules, and they’re not scum. They just had a very unfortunate break. I think there’s something about that examination of that which is very deep psychological and socio-economic issues, but then in a very entertaining way. I think when you get a message combined with the entertainment value, I think that’s when you’re really on to something. Because if you have a story like that, which can be very depressing and very heartbreaking and very dour in other hands, if you can make that funny and actually make that interesting, you can put your message across all the more strongly. So I think that’s what I love about Ken Loach, the fact that he knows that in order to get people to listen to your message, you have to be able to entertain them. I think that’s a much harder thing to do than to just put a message across in a very prescribed way. He works hard to make things as entertaining as he possibly can, knowing that his message is gonna come across all the more effectively. I think he’s the king of the message."

"I came to this record through the Encyclopaedia Of Jazz. As a teenager I played a lot of jazz piano, but more like learning how to play bop or more traditional types of jazz. And I was getting to the point where I was starting to find out about Sun Ra and some of the weirder stuff that was out there, and I was working through the encyclopaedia and I crossed every record off the list if I thought it would be far out and interesting. We had a scam going at the time. HMV in Toronto was pretty relaxed and you could return things for cash value immediately. So I'd go in and buy a stack of ten CDs and I'd just got a CD burner - this was like 1997 - so I'd take them home and burn them all and then take them straight back. And they'd be like, ""You've got the entire recorded work of The Beatles here - you didn't find anything that you liked on there?"" And I'd be like, ""No these are all rubbish, sorry."" And I did the same with John Coltrane. Then I can remember getting to the Albert Ayler page of the encyclopaedia and you know how there's that snooty canonisation thing with jazz music where somebody like Wynton Marsalis or one of those conservative types would be like, ""This guy lost the plot. He went off the deep end."" But this record blew me away. I got this and Interstellar Space, the John Coltrane album, and they both have long periods of free-form wildness on them. But the thing I loved about Albert Ayler is the melodies on the songs - again, a lot of them sound the same, but they feel so elemental to me. It's another record where I feel like those melodies have been there since the beginning of time and it just took him to play them. The sound of his saxophone is so amazing. It's super far-out and forward-looking. If that's too out there for you, there's this album by him called New Grass, where he hired a rock band, and it's like some A&R man had tried to make him have a hit record. There's a song on it called 'Heart Love' - it's less far-out but it has his crazy saxophone playing on it, but with a beautiful melody and this free-soul singing on it."

"I think [the performances are] what it is for me with films. Like Raging Bull, for instance. It’s just beautiful. I love Robert De Niro and how he was just able to embody Jake LaMotta that way. That was inspiring to me. I remember thinking, “Oh wow, this guy is just like a chameleon.” He’s just able to take on the spirit of someone and become this person. I was really fascinated by that. The fact that he went on to gain all this weight for LaMotta in the later years, and his relationship with his brother; it’s so powerful. I had a younger brother. I just really related to that. And their relationship, how they just love each other so much, but do such awful things to each other sometimes. And the whole story itself, the life of a fighter. What makes a fighter and what makes a fighter kick? I’m also a huge boxing fan. I box. That was something that I considered doing as a profession at one point, until I got punched really f—ing hard [laughing]. It’s just an awful f—ing feeling, and it sucked. And I was like, “I’m not going to do this for a living; there’s no way [laughing].” And with that, my whole attitude changed about that really quick. But I have so much respect for what those guys do, the fact that these guys — I mean, they literally fight for a living, and they train so hard. I’ve been in the gym and I see what these guys do. It’s also a poverty thing, too, in a lot of ways. I don’t think a lot of really wealthy people jump in the gym and decide they want to be a boxer. It’s usually these guys; “I’m gonna make something for me. I’m gonna make something for my family. I’m gonna do it by training six, seven, eight hours a day and getting in the ring with one other man. And f—ing laying it all on the f—ing line.” I have a great respect for that. It’s one of those movies you can feel. It’s visceral that way. And the dialogue just seems to come almost effortlessly. So much like life; it really is like you are watching this piece of life. I really love films like that. "

"Like with the Slade live album, I'd been to see The Who and it was quite an experience, again at the Orchid Ballroom in Purley. It's one of the most unknown venues in the country, I think, but it was the biggest ballroom in Europe and it used to hold about 5000 people. It was huge, and you wouldn't even know it was there when you drove past; it was just a doorway, in Purley. And I think The Who had just come back from America where they'd been doing Tommy. So it was Townshend in his white boiler suit and nailing Keith Moon's drums down before the set, and The James Gang opening. I'm not sure when Live At Leeds came out, whether it was before or after that, but I just remember how amazing the album was because it had all of those pull-outs and receipts and photographs and things. I was sitting on the train and looking at the record and really hoping that people would think I was in the record business and that I'd received this white label with a load of bills. But again I'd seen them play that sort of show, and I think Live At Leeds really was them at the top of their game. As a live band they'd really pulled together and they'd done their homework. They'd done enough and they'd really nailed how to put it together on stage. For me they didn't do a better live thing. Tommy I liked, but I thought a lot of it was unnecessary and went on a bit, and it was a bit more Who than I wanted, in some cases. The real thing that always stuck with me with this record is where they do the jamming stuff and Townshend takes off on that discordant thing, and the dynamics and atmosphere are liable to go up and down, taking it from this raging onslaught of rock down to this level of almost subtlety, and then to build it up again from that. They're good dynamics, and those are often hard to find. There's something about that sound they got as well: not so much as a band but just the guitar sound. It was very clean and there was a lot of clarity. And the drums: the sound never changes, but the dynamics of what he does have peaks and troughs."

"I can remember being introduced to this album at a very specific moment. I went round to my friend's house, and I think my sister had the CD and put it on, and I heard the introduction to 'Lithium' and those drums and I just thought: ""What the hell is this?"" It was the most exciting thing I'd ever heard. It was like that for a lot of people of course, I was no different. But it was very shortly after we heard that that my friend got a drum kit and my brother got a guitar, and my brother had a bass, and I knew that all I had to do was pick up that bass and we had a band. Nirvana were a three-piece and there were three of us. You didn't have to play very well, and you could play the same thing quietly and then play it loudly and that was kind of a revelation for a little kid. That was all Nirvana ever did and created the most amazing feelings with it. It was a very powerful thing to put into the hands of a little teenager. It's really easy to get together. You just all need to play the same thing on these three instruments and it will work, and you will sound like a band and that's so empowering. In terms of my musical style, Cobain has a really good way with melody and he doesn't really sing very obvious things. He always comes down on the major or minor third of a chord, and it really colours the music both positively and negatively in a way that not a lot of melodies do. The aggression in it and the fact that it can be tender in one moment and then the opposite the next is something which happens in my music. The emotional intensity of Nirvana is something which I definitely think my band is probably guilty of, in terms of high emotional stuff happening. They are really interesting, just in terms of the fact that there's so much depth in it, despite it being very simple, and the lyrics don't actually mean anything, and yet you can get so affected by Nirvana in such a strange way - not necessarily just because of Kurt's story, but because there is something in the music and it's very difficult to describe."

"This is Emmanuel Mario, who I met in Toulouse thanks to Julien Gasc. Julien also does his own great records and is part of Aquaserge. I could have put Aquaserge in the list, because they would totally fall into this category of people who've been working very hard for many years and who eventually make a masterpiece. But they're all part of a group of people in Toulouse who I finally met. I say finally, because I left France absolutely appalled that I couldn't meet anyone that could mirror my taste and my desire to make music. So I immigrated to this country, for the music, and of course I had met Tim, so it made a lot of sense. In France it was impossible. But anyway in 2003 or 4 I came across this group of people who were all incredibly talented and sexy and good-looking and had no big egos, and with no shame about what they were doing, exposing their vision. There were a lot of complexes in the French music scene which got better later on, but to me these people were like, wow, I've found my brothers and sisters, it was absolutely wonderful. So Emmanuel became a long-time collaborator and he's very good at working with other people, but there was also a desire to do his own stuff. He was kind of doing it before he started working on this project, but then I guess he found his focus and made this incredible piece of work. From one track to another you're transported to very different countries, but it's also very familiar to Emmanuel, and I find that to be a real strength: to have such a variety of different styles, but still be familiar and to have some similarity. He reaches really far out to find certain tracks and to bring them back to a whole. I think it's a brilliant album musically and also for its variety. It also tells a story, about the Kerguelen Islands, which were discovered by this French captain. He was sent to go and find new islands and new places to conquer, and I think he was trying to conquer these islands but they're not conquerable. There's too much wind and it's too hostile. But he said that they were worth conquering; he lied about those islands and was treated like a hero, but eventually the truth came out."

"Full disclosure - I'm a little biased. They're on DFA, they're my friends, and one of them is my boyfriend. But regardless of that I think it's a really beautiful record. The first record they did was great but I know that they were still trying to hone their sound, figure out what they were and what sort of stance to take. So with Dynamics I think it's way more solid and way more confident. Knowing them, they're such an interesting combination writing-wise because one of them, if it were up to him, would make a Tangerine Dream record, and the other has real pop sensibilities. So together they can make this thing that's really lush, beautiful and complex, but also accessible. I feel the album was overlooked somehow, and I don't really understand it. It makes me question my musical sensibility. I think this record is amazing so why doesn't everybody think this record is amazing? But it is. I listened to it a couple of months before it came out and at the time I was touring a lot as a DJ, spending a lot of time by myself because that's just what happens when you're a DJ that has to travel. So it was getting a little bleak. Every day I was in some other place, alone, inside of a hotel room, inside a club, on an aeroplane. But I had that record on my iPod and I would have to go running just to stop myself from throwing myself under a bus. I loved every song and each time I listened to it I'd try and pick my favourite track but as each one ended another one would start that I thought was better than the other. It's a mystery to me though, because it's not like I was the only person who loved it. All of our friends, the whole of DFA, whose musical tastes I trust over anybody else, we were all in agreement that it was a great record. I think maybe I just don't know what other people want to hear, which is an uncomfortable position to be in doing what I do. But I know that they're very proud of the record and so I'm glad for that."