"The thing about Shiny Beast is it features Beefheart having come through a very difficult period. If you look at him, he started off with The Legendary A&M Sessions doing 'Diddy Wah Diddy' and then Safe As Milk with Ry Cooder, which is a great blues album with a bit of pop to it. And then you've got Trout Mask Replica which is one of the wonders of the world, really. I love the myth of it, him locking the musicians up in the house and feeding them hallucinogens but not proper food, of them having to go to the local store to thieve food to keep body and soul together, and Beefheart taking credit for all the music when he couldn't really play and he was surrounded by these musical geniuses - so the myth of it is well deserved. They're all great records but then the Magic Band left him and he got session musicians in and it just got depressing. He wasn't a particularly nice character, he was just hell bent on making records the way he wanted them. For example, there's a story about him firing a crossbow at one of his musicians. That's why Ry Cooder left, he had to dive behind the sofa and then left not long afterwards. [Actually Ry Cooder quit in disgust after Beefheart fell off a ten foot stage at the Mount Tamalpais Festival, landing on the band's manager Bob Krasnow. The singer was on LSD and in a state of shock after seeing a girl in the audience turn into a fish with bubbles coming out of its mouth. It was the original Magic Band drummer Doug Moon who threatened Beefheart with a crossbow, unable to put up with the singer's incessant criticism. Ed] It was Mark Smith who introduced me to Beefheart and it was this album, it was 1977 and I was 16. It was an amazing album and so beautiful. 'Tropical Hot Dog Night' is one of the most beautiful songs you'll ever hear. 'The Floppy Boot Stomp' is so exciting… it just rings like a bell. It has some of the most beautiful and exciting music you'll ever hear and the musicianship is great."

"Like lots of people my age, Radiohead were a big band before Kid A. The Bends were where I really got into them, and then OK Computer really blew me away. But then Kid A came out and it was nothing like their other stuff. They took away all their guitars. They were the kings of guitars and they took them all away, and they replaced it with really out of tune, quiet synths and little drum machines and it made me and all my friends really surprised. We didn't know what this meant because we were so used to guitars being important, and then Radiohead came along and said you don't need any of that stuff, screw it. That really changed my attitude. Radiohead showed a generation that you don't need to be afraid of change. I just think it was such a brave decision, considering where they were in their career, what they had come from and what they had become well known for. They threw it all out the window and that inspired a huge amount of people I think, and it inspires us every time with think of it, or whenever we talk about turning our attention to a new album, we always have it in the back of our minds that we could ""pull a Kid A"", we could pull a U-turn, and that comes down to the fact that they were willing to do that, it was inspiring. Obviously loads of musical stuff came out of Kid A. The way Thom Yorke sings is pretty indelibly put into me, and a lot of the way the band play, and everything Jonny Greenwood does, influences us. It's what Kid A's attitude was really. It's really slapdash in the way it's recorded, it's really awkwardly mixed. It sounds like they've done it themselves out of old pieces of machinery that shouldn't work anymore. Gone are all the shiny, beautiful guitar tones and high production. Even his voice is beautiful and yet it's been corrupted and you can't really hear what he's saying, and he's singing falsetto. All the stuff that we kind of relied on them for all got chucked in the bin and that's just fucking awesome!"

"There are certain bands that are hard to talk about, OMD, Simple Minds, where their earlier records were just phenomenal, and later on they made records that were too commercial and not quite as strong as their earlier ones. The first OMD album, Dazzle Ships and Architecture & Morality were flawless. They were beautiful, experimental, inspiring records, then a few years on they were making music for John Hughes movies, and they were good at it and I'm glad that they had success with it, but it wasn't nearly as creatively inspiring as the first three records. Architecture & Morality, I mean it's not hard to overdo the hyperbole, but it's a perfect album, so cohesive, and every song perfectly speaks to the other song, the unapologetic emotional quality of it is really inspiring. Even the artwork by Peter Saville, everything about it is perfectly crafted. One of my very odd musical moments was years ago when I was at South By South West in Austin and OMD were doing a reunion show at a BBQ at three in the afternoon, and they asked me to play bass with them. I found myself playing bass with OMD on 'Enola Gay' at a BBQ at three in the afternoon in Texas. It was one of those moments where you told me that actually I'd just done way too much mescaline and I was currently lying on a bed somewhere and making up the whole thing, I'd believe you. It's a shame that a lot of people came to know of OMD through the last couple of records that were more commercial. It's like Simple Minds, the first five albums are amazing, and then they became a stadium rock band. Now you mention Simple Minds and people think about 'Alive And Kicking' and 'Don't You Forget About Me' which aren't terrible songs, but the earlier stuff was experimental and textural and weird. Maybe someone sees OMD on this list and immediately thinks of a John Hughes movie, maybe they'll be inspired to back and listen to Architecture & Morality."

"In terms of the first film that I remember having a real visceral connection with me, it’d be The Producers, the original Producers, with Mel Brooks. There was something about such a rich movie, in terms of the richness of the ideas and the power of the quality. If you take the two central performances of Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel, they’re such powerful performances. And you think that they’d both be almost too much for the screen because they both put in so much detail and they both bring so much energy. And they’re both such ballsy and powerful performances, you’d think that the screen wouldn’t be able to contain it. Especially because I was watching it on a TV screen, you think no screen is big enough to contain these two’s performance. But there’s something about the way they work together and the way their styles complement each other and the suitedness of those characterizations, the detail that they both put in. There was something about that. When you get two performers that are so beautifully in sync with each other, it’s like a jigsaw. Whatever one of them’s missing, the other kind of fills in with a perfectly compatible performance. It’s like listening to an opera, listening to those two perform with each other. I feel that way a lot about Mel Brooks in general, in terms of the way he writes and directs. There’s such musicality to that comedy. It’s so specific, and it reads like a musical score. You have to be able to play that absolutely precisely. There’s almost not enough room for interpretation on it. And for actors, they have to be able to say the lines. But the thing about Zero and Gene Wilder is they nail the musicality of it so perfectly and yet manage to layer all of this beautiful character on top of it as well. And they really attacked it. The chemistry and the musicality between them was something that really made me sit up and take notice when I was a young kid. It was very powerful, I remember it very vividly, seeing that for the first time."

"There are certain records that I know a lot about and others that I don't, and I think this one, for me, purely on a symphonic, musical level, it just is one of my favourite classical pieces. I think it's especially about the first movement, where the double-basses come in barely audibly, and it builds and they're just repeating their pattern. There's something about pattern in classical music, and that's why I've chosen Steve Reich as well: phrases and themes that get repeated and then get others on top that repeat, it's a cyclical thing that starts to happen with this harmony and rhythm, and it fascinates me. I also love double basses being bowed, there's just something about that that really pleases me. It builds into this huge thing and there's this moment where there's just one piano note, like a summoning, and the woman's voice comes in. I just think it's really soulful. I could've chosen Ravel's Bolero, which is also a really popular piece of music, but it's another one of my absolute favourites because again it's repetitive, it's almost like dance music, it's a repetitive theme that builds and builds. When I was going to see Underworld, off my face, in a tent - I think there's something similar, when instrumental music just builds and builds and builds. [Górecki] is really interesting technically as well as emotionally, which is the theme of this whole discussion almost: my greatest love is of people that have managed to walk that line between technical, competent songwriting or structure or understanding the art form and understanding the craftsmanship and at the same time imbuing that with reality and grit and fucking true connection to soulfulness and the universe. You can make a person cry because of what you're doing. That combination is just dynamite, isn't it? There's nothing better. You can sit in a room making a lot of avant-garde white noise and wanking over yourself, that's fine, or you can make amazing, soulful pop songs. Surely the artist's job is to be a consummate craftsman but within that be a complete child, innocent of expression and tapped in."