"I could easily talk for several hours just about this. It was particularly this piece called 'It's Gonna Rain' that I heard with my friend Peter Schmidt, the painter. I'd met Peter while I was at art college and he was a very, very distinctive and unusual character. He was a German Jew who'd come over to England in the '30s and was a very good poker player because it was impossible to know what he was thinking. He was a very inscrutable person. Most people found it very hard to be with him as you'd say something to him and he'd just look at you. But I liked him a lot and we got on very well, and it turned out we'd been thinking about a lot of similar things. One of the things we used to do was sit around at his place in Stockwell and explore new music. Generally it was he who would play things to me and one day he said, ""Have you heard this?"" and my life changed. Reich recorded this in '65, so that's 51 years old and fucking hell, what have we been doing for half a century? The first thing that happens when you're listening to that is that the repetitive element of it gradually makes you start to lose focus of the pieces that keep repeating. You start hearing the little differences. It's a little bit like the way a frog's eye works. It doesn't scan like ours do, it stays fixed on a scene and very quickly the rods and cones get saturated with everything that doesn't move. So as soon as something does move, like a fly, that's the only thing that the frog sees. I think the ears behave like that when they're presented with something highly repetitive like this. Your ears quickly saturate or habituate with the common stuff and they start to pick up details. I remember the first time I heard 'It's Gonna Rain', I started to zone in on the pigeons, because this was out in the street, it was a recording of a street preacher so you can hear cars and horns and then you start to hear these birds but only after a while, after the other stuff has cleared out of your consciousness. That's amazing because what was making the music was my brain and that was the first time I'd realised that, as a composer, you could co-opt a listener's brain. So suddenly, wow, that's another 100 per cent of the universe opening up. When you put something out into the world that is kind of incomplete and it takes your consciousness and the errors of your perceptual mechanism to actually make it into something, that totally changed my idea of what music could be. The actual amount of material used is tiny, the loop of ""it's gonna rain"" is not even a second, and that's the only element used in that section. You think, bloody hell, that's economy, and I've always loved economy. At the time I first heard this we were in a period of maximum indulgence in pop music. Sixteen-track recorders had just appeared so suddenly so many people were just putting so much shit onto everything just because you could. Every spice in the cupboard. Suddenly I heard this and it was so stark and effective. The other thing about it is that within it is a mechanism that I've subsequently used a lot, which is the idea of having things running out of sync with each other. Again, your whole experience of music until then had been to do with synchronisation. Everything sticks together and then at this point everything changes together. What happens in this piece is that you get the same cycle but running so that on each repetition they're in a slightly different place in relation to each other. So you have an automatic generator of variety and I use that on so much of my work. That became my go-to technique for making something interesting straight away."

"This song was a really pivotal moment in my life, it was the first record I ever bought and it was by a complete fluke. ‘Jeepster’ was in a bargain box for 10p and it happened to have a photograph of Marc Bolan and Mickey Finn on the label, that was unusual, it was rare to have a photograph on the label and Marc Bolan looked androgynous, very beautiful, mysterious and quite weird. “So at the age of ten I took a punt on this thing. With that money I could have bought a few comics and an ice lolly, I’d have taken the stick and put it in the wheel of my bike, which was very important! But I bought ‘Jeepster’ instead and I did that thing of walking home and looking and looking at it. Fifteen minutes later I put in on and it snagged my attention straightaway, I had to pay attention to it, but it was pop music. “I listen to it now and it’s quite lo-fi, but even then I had an awareness it sounded like people in a room and that it was pretty rough, which was a bit of an ask for a little kid, it certainly wasn’t music for 10 year olds, 15 year olds maybe. I heard the sound of his guitar and why the hell I was hearing bongos in there as well was really intriguing to me. Before it was three quarters of the way through I was planning on playing it again and trying to find out how this thing worked. “The riff is funky without being James Brown and his limitations as a guitar player were really useful on all of his records up until ‘20th Century Boy’, which was very brutal. ‘Jeepster’ is very funky but he’s almost playing with the same limitations of John Lee Hooker, if he was any better - a Ritchie Blackmore or an Eric Clapton - it wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting because it would have sounded too bland, accomplished and slick. He’s hanging in there a bit, particularly on the outro, the riff is so dumb a more accomplished guitar player wouldn’t have been heard dead playing it. It’s so gauche, but it’s probably the best bit of music on the record. “Then there’s the way the band go in and out of time. I picked that up the third time I listened to it and that was really amazing, because on the radio at the time it was The Osmond’s ‘Love Me for a Reason’, The Carpenters, Andy Williams and all this slick, easy listening stuff, but this was a real pre-Glam record. “It identified me, I was ‘I know what it is to be a fan of this thing of my own now.’ I’d seen my parents be fans and to this day they’re fans of bands, but because I became a fan of this guy I was getting all these signals - particularly from girls’ magazines - about what it was to be a fan and having posters on my walls. The Smiths were very aware of that dynamic. “I grew up very close to my sister, who was eleven months younger than me and I’m glad that was something that happened for me, because I had a real sense of what she liked. I’d almost been like a twin, what they call an Irish twin with my sister, and it gave me a genuine appreciation of how great it was to be a girl. “It’s a fantastic function of pop culture, that shifting to take in different gender roles both ways, with people like Lady Gaga and Richey Manic. Marc Bolan was beautiful and he sounded really beautiful, the sound of a soft voice singing in a Rock and Roll way over a rock band has never really left me and that’s probably evident on my solo stuff. “Because of the photograph of Marc Bolan on the sleeve, his androgyny and the way he was singing, it was my first independent connection of seeing a different image of masculinity. I was very, very aware of that, because he was obviously wearing make-up and he was very pretty. I was hearing this guy singing in quite an effeminate voice and I owned the record, so I’d better love it. It wasn’t that I was just loving the music, I’d invested in this thing where this guy was like a woman and that was really exciting."

"The ‘60s things we’ve discussed were a really big influence on me - it almost seemed like an early dream - but then I got into the Bowie, glam rock thing, which was my first choice of things in a way. That led me into New York punk rock and that’s the bit that made me pick up the guitar. I’d played the guitar a bit, but along with Television, Talking Heads made me want to be in a band and that whole scene inspired me much more than English punk rock. That time very much felt like a new chapter - ‘out with the old, and in with the new’ - and I guess that’s what punk rock was, but I thought a lot of the English punk bands were a bit crap. There were a few good ones and a lot of people talk about The Clash and The Pistols, but for me it was Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Blondie, MC5, New York Dolls and Iggy Pop. I loved all that stuff and it somehow seemed to fit with glam rock, with Bowie, Roxy Music and Marc Bolan and led me into Talking Heads and that whole thing. When I was an unemployed kid I’d get the bus into town, wander around and meet loads of people who wanted to form bands. There weren’t many people into The Velvet Underground back then, which I was at the time and I was a bit of a misfit in many ways. Matthew Street in Liverpool was a run-down area of empty warehouses then and there was nothing much there, but I met a lot of likeminded people around a warehouse called The Liverpool School of Music, Dream, Art and Pun and that was where I first met a lot of the guys who ended up in my first band. Opposite to that there was a record shop called Probe, a tea rooms and a club called Eric’s, and they became the centre of my everyday existence. Eric’s was set up by a guy called Roger Eagle who had been in Manchester. He was a Northern Soul DJ and a music aficionado and was heavily involved in the scene. Although those bands weren’t mainstream at that point, I got to see them all at Eric’s, which was brilliant. We got let into the gigs for free in return for helping them to carry amps and I got to chat to all of the bands that I loved at the time. As a song, “Psycho Killer” really stood out. It was very compelling and there was the whole idea of how David Byrne looked like he was a college professor or something, he was so awkward and gangly, but he had brilliant words. I remember thinking at the time ‘He’s not singing about the usual things, how are these words in a song? How do you do this?!’"

"This is more of a current favourite and I first heard it when it came out. I'd left Supergrass and started writing for the first solo album and I got quite deep into that when I heard Shields, but really it was like the bridge between Here Come The Bombs and Matador. I just love the fact that I can hear the room on this record; I can hear the rawness of it, I can hear their love of sounds which is something that I'm a bit of a nerd about and those are some of the things just grabbed me straight away. It's so weird; sometimes a bass guitar sound can be enough to make me love or hate a band. It's quite shallow when you think about it, because it should be about the lyrics, and the package, and the melody, and everything about it but no, it's like: 'If that bass is shit then I don't like it!' I can get quite anal about those sorts of things, so Grizzly Bear are another one that I aesthetically gravitate to towards immediately, and then appreciate later the songwriting and the melodies, and Edward Droste's voice is similar to that of Midlake's Tim Smith. There's a similar quality in both of their voices that I really appreciate. And I like their playing with synths as well; they're not too overt or progressive rock-like. Yeah, this was definitely an inspiring album for me. I guess, if I'm being really honest, it made me think that I wanted to write a record like that. It's not screaming out hit singles all over it and I'm sure this wasn't an easy album for their record label to present to radio stations, but I really like that. When you've been in a band for 20 years [and] with each album, you get this extremely intense pressure to provide a three-minute pop single and I just wanted out. But writing those pop singles did come naturally and I don't think we'd have done as well as we'd done if I hadn't and I think I still do. Even on Matador I still can't help containing things in three or three-and-a-half minutes. It's like what Supergrass did on 'Strange Ones' or even 'Caught By The Fuzz'. There's a lot of information on those songs and it flies by. I guess that's just the natural way that I write. But then again, having listened to a lot of music on soundtracks over the years, the music on this album made me realise that I don't have to contain it all. It's like 'Detroit' on Matador; I really like the groove on that, so I just kept it going. It satisfies my curiosity like Neu!'s 'Hallogallo' does. I'm happy to sit there for that ten minutes. I think Supergrass came from quite a psychedelic background and that's stayed with me and what I'm into. This is where bands like Grizzly Bear come in, and I think that psychedelic thread runs through a lot of these records."