"This was the point where Steve Miller set up his own studio and started recording in his own time. He lost himself in that process. I love his take on music – it's his own brand of psychedelia. It's very blissful on one hand, very groovy on the other. He created his own musical world and almost ends up referencing himself rather than taking influences from other people. I love it when an artist has a feedback loop to their own music. The first track, 'Song For Our Ancestors', is the one for me. It's soundtrack-y, incredibly evocative. It starts with a giant foghorn and this beautiful tremolo guitar that seems to emerge from the mists. Again, it's taking you somewhere, imagining this other world, albeit rooted in history rather than just imagination."

"It's the same era, yeah. If anything, it demonstrates my eclectic nature, and also it illustrates an amazing period in music history. This album is still my favourite Bjork record, though I love a lot of things she does and I don't want to limit her to this one. It really illustrated the zeitgeist, especially if you were gay. There was a sophistication [to the gay scene] that wasn't being defined by the dance music scene – though maybe a little bit with the Pet Shop Boys. Bjork really brought the whole dance world, the clubbing world, up to this other more introspective level, and dealt with this strange life that everybody seemed to be living: on one hand it was really great and beautiful and passionate, but also very frightening, drug-induced and AIDS-related. She just became this kind of phantom for what everybody was really feeling."

"There have been many biographies about The Who but this one is almost as entertaining as the group it documents. Dave Marsh, who was a founding editor at Creem magazine and an editor at Rolling Stone, writes as an unashamed fan of the band. No other writer, with the exception of Richard Barnes, has ever really understood The Who the way Marsh did with this work. In Before I Get Old the author analyzes their roots in "Mod" culture to their development into "the first avant-garde rock band". As a biography it is valuable piece of rock-music history."

"My dad’s Greek and he came to Britain when he was nine or ten. Like a lot of people, he used music to maintain his identity and when I was a kid, he used to play a lot of the stuff that he brought with him - everything from contemporary rock to older folk and then Yannis Markopoulos as well. He’s one of Greece’s foremost composers. He’s from Crete and he sort of interpolates melodies and rhythms in a way that’s thousands of years old really. “This particular song has a real resonance for me, because it’s probably the first piece of music I can remember the experience of listening to. My dad used to put it on when I was two or three years old and he’d put me on his shoulders and spin me around. It’s incredibly hypnotic and repetitive and I remember this amazing sensation of the first time I had that feeling of music moving me beyond the state of resting existence. It’s stuck with me and I can still put it on and get chills from it - partly because it’s a very powerful piece of music anyway, and partly because it has that incredible memory attached for me as well. “Greek music is still a big part of my life. A few years ago I was involved in this performance at the Barbican where various musicians got together to perform the music and tell the story of another Greek composer, Markos Vamvakaris, and I was the narrator. I joined the rest of the musicians to sing with them at the end of the show and it was a great moment for me. When you’re a generation removed it’s tougher to stay in touch with your national identity, you have to put a little bit more effort in to appreciate your history and your heritage, but it’s worth it"

"When I was making 19, my manager suggested I cover a Bob Dylan song, Make You Feel My Love. I didn’t really know much about Dylan at the time, but I suddenly got interested, got into his back history – and that’s how I found Karen Dalton. She used to open for Dylan back in the day in Greenwich Village. There’s not a lot of her music out there, she died quite young. But her voice! Something haunting there, even eerie. The tone is amazing – it reminded me a lot of Amy Winehouse. They both have almost a slur in their voice, which is so charismatic."