"When I was in Junior High, I met this guy and he had a cassette with Minor Threat on one side and The Exploited on the other. He left it at my house, and I had a Walkman, so I popped it in as I was walking to school. I heard the first chord of “Filler” and then I stopped and turned around. I didn’t go to school that day. I listened to that cassette and I was ‘What is this? This is awesome, this is what I need right now. These people are speaking my language, and they’re young like me as well.’ That’s when I thought I could maybe write a song, record it and put it on a record. That’s all I thought. I didn’t want to be a famous rock star but maybe I could do that DIY stuff. Not like the rock stars who were bigger than life - it was hard to aspire to that - but this other stuff? Yeah, I could do this. Plus, I thought that girls would think it was pretty cool if I played the guitar and I was in a band. So I started a band and this song and the first Minor Threat record was a game changer for me. It also started my record collecting phase. After I got into Minor Threat, I got into Dischord Records - I wanted everything on that label, so I spent years collecting that stuff. I still have all the singles; I might still have it all of it. That band had a huge effect on me that led me to want to write and play music, but also it was a club I could belong to. I was part of something with it – I could put on a leather jacket and help my teenage angst."

"I'd already bought the single, 'He's Misstra Know It All' and played that to death. I bought this album on the day that it came out in Woolworth's, when I was on holiday in Eastbourne. And then I had to wait a week to listen to it. I spent that time reading the back cover about Moogs, ARPs and other synth sounds and I didn't even know what those words meant! My imagination was quite engaged because he seemed to have played all of the instruments and that was unusual back then. But I've always liked records that have that much of a one-man stamp on them. The sound of Innervisions was different from what was around at that point. There wasn't anything that sounded as colourful as this album. These new synthesizers sounded sensuous and they were moving in a very animalistic way while being chest-resonators with humanistic kind of sounds. It was fascinating when I was first getting into music. It was a more sophisticated kind of pop music compared to what was going on at that point. All these complicated chords that Stevie Wonder was using were very intriguing to me. The sonics on this album really hit me and some tracks are more fruity than others. Then you had tracks like 'Visions', which are more jazzy and quite guitar-orientated. They gave me feelings that I didn't understand as a teenager, and even after over 40 years, Innervisions keeps on giving. I keep going back to it because it's got so many emotional layers: there's anger there, there's tenderness and there's a lot of commitment to the music. Stevie Wonder seemed more real and that was something you could align yourself with."

"It's an album that had a massive effect on me when I was young. I remember on Steve Lamacq's Roundtable, there was a track from Journal For Plague Lovers which a member of Wire completely slagged off. So this shows how much I actually like this album, because he obviously hated us and thought were just plod-rocking, rock-dinosaur philistines. But despite that I'm still going to quote this as a really influential album for me. A lot of people pick Pink Flag and Chairs Missing as their favourite records, but for me this is the apex of their achievement: they're still fusing really blunt-edge experimental rock with really abstract notions and wild ideologues and monologues of different sorts. There's a song on there called 'The 15th' which is just an amazing song; there's another song called 'The Other Window', which has a direct lineage from some of the Velvet Underground narrated songs like 'The Gift', and it's about this guy travelling on a train and outside there's an animal dying in a barbed-wire fence. There's another song called 'Two People In A Room' which is just fucking brutal. A lot of people like Wire then they're bleak or when people couldn't get a handle on what they were saying, but I think on this you can pin down the emotion to the record, pin down the marriage of experimental edge with rock. For me, it's one of the great lost post-punk records. It's an amazing record that never really gets written about. It was produced by Mike Thorne who never did as good a record again. And I just love the cover: it's got a very… almost Mondrian kind of vibe to it. It's really strange and quite unsettling. I just love the record."

"The mythology is that Jimmy Page played on that, but it's clearly Jeff Beck all the way - that personality. The interesting way they recorded the tracks is that the entire band were in the studio at the same time. And Ronnie Wood on bass. I think Ronnie Wood is actually a better bass player than he is a guitar player. The bass playing on that record is just great! You can hear mistakes, but listen to what the bass does in 'Rock My Plimsoul', it goes completely against the drums, but it gives it like a slinky snake-like feel. From beginning to end you have this kind of jamming, drunken-keyboard-player-in-a-New-Orleans-whorehouse-upright-piano feel. It's the best vocal that Rod Stewart has ever done on that first record, I don't think he's ever equalled it. He ran out of songs to do, so he covered 'Greensleeves' instrumental, he just didn't have any more songs! 'Shapes Of Things' was a cover that he originally did with The Yardbirds and then did a version here, and tore. It. Up. Such a heavy, heavy band. I remember seeing them live in New York City. The rest of the kids didn't understand, but I was just blown away. I remember it well, the opening band was the Crazy [World of] Arthur Brown. He came out in a mask with his head lit on fire. That was actually connected later to by fire-spitting in the band. I just thought, 'Well that's a good idea'. The thing you noticed that while everyone was drinking, flirting, talking or whatever, when Arthur Brown walked onstage with his head on fire, everyone stopped!"

"It's an unstoppable record. I nicked my copy so I never had a sleeve for it, so I never got any of the song titles or anything like that. But again it's a very complete record. It's one of the few albums that I can just leave on and it can play all the way through and you don't go oh, not this track again, I hate this song. Everything on it sounds like it was recorded in somebody's bedroom. I've never even looked up how they actually did do it, but I just love that the machines and the loops they used were pretty much standard for the dance crowd, and things like where I would have said oh, not that beat again, everybody's heard that loop, you know, actually they turned round and said ah, but if we do it like this it sounds really good. And the production on it is amazing. Some of the things that are going on with the timings on the compressors and the noise gates, on that level there's plenty to listen to, as well as the songs being great. The dynamics and the editing in and out and the mixes are really quite something else. I wonder sometimes if it's only because I've made records myself that I get how much work must've gone into that to make it happen. But at the same time it still sounds like it was done in a bedroom. But again, they're very minimalist in what they use. They pick their shots. When they do something they make sure it's in the right way and in the right place. There's nothing in there that clouds the water or gets in the way of the vocals or loses the bass. It's always relevant."

"I can’t really remember when I first heard this song, it was probably on tour at some point with Supergrass, but I heard it again a year or so ago on the radio on 6 Music and I remembered what a cool song it was - ‘Oh fuck yes, I know that track, I’m going to listen to it again.’ I heard The Fire Engines on 6 Music recently, their song ‘Big Gold Dream’ and again I remember hearing that over the years and thinking ‘fuck, that’s really cool’, it really reminded me of early Supergrass as well and then you hear the new wave punk thing and all the bands that The Fire Engines must have inspired. “We Did It Again’ satisfies that whole kind of throwaway feel to a song. I love the beat of this and the pace of the track. It’s my kind of drumbeat as well, that motoring, 1974 German drumbeat. I’m not really a big Soft Machine fan to be honest, I haven’t got loads of their records, but I really like the vibe of this. “I think it’s inspiring in terms of way that it sounds and a repetitive lyric is always good, I always love a repetitive lyric. It’s the attitude of track, that’s another thing that jumps out at me when I hear something, the attitude. This is kind of irreverent and offhand and I like things when they’re throwaway. They’re not throwaway in the sense that they’ve not been worked on a lot, but this is a great one for me in that if you can deliver something that you’ve worked on and it’s finessed but it sounds a bit throwaway, I think that’s a great combo."

"I was only ten when it came out, but I knew there and then that this was the best music ever, that album. Obviously, child of the seventies, I had grown up on quite luridly sentimental and cheesy music [laughs]! Because you didn't really see punk on the television or hear it on the radio, I never really noticed it, but I did hear how it affected pop music, which is new wave, synth-pop, Elvis Costello and Blondie and stuff like that. In amongst all that, you had Gary Numan and The Human League. It was a breath of fresh air, definitely. I can see myself in my dressing gown watching Top Of The Pops. Obviously, 'Don't You Want Me', which they casually put at the end of the record, is one of the ultimate pop hits of that era and it seemed to be number one for just ages, which was fine by me, because I loved the video as well. Also one of my favourite records, I couldn't put it in this list because it's just a single, is 'Pop Music' by M, which kind of sums up that era for me completely. That's a great record, but he never made a decent album! Dare is, of all the albums on the list, it's probably the most complete - there's not a bad tune on it. They're just at the absolute pinnacle of their powers. It's not just about great pop music, because they were quite experimental still. It's not so much crazy experimental sounds, but it's really, really hard-edged and it doesn't let you off the hook. Nothing has really got a lot of reverb or delay on it, it's very, very clean. Some of the sounds go right through your head, piercing."