"Some people would say that The Smiths never really recorded one great album and that they were more of a singles band and I kind of see what they mean. I do really like Meat Is Murder, which is a weirdly psychedelic record with really long tracks. They really did the legwork with that album. But I remember before The Queen Is Dead came out it was an event… they were about to release their first album as a big band. I remember hearing the first single, ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’, and they had moved on. And then I got it and… the cover was awful… just a piece of shit. But then I played it and it starts with that sample: 'Oh take me back to dear old Blighty…' And it was, 'Fucking hell…' Just astonishing. One of the best openings to an album ever. And that’s before you get to ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’. They could have had the photograph outside of Salford Lads Club as the front cover but then Morrissey is wearing a really daft jacket. It’s brown with black love hearts on it. Very strange. I remember seeing them on that tour when they came to the G-Mex. They came on stage to 'The Queen Is Dead' and Morrissey was carrying a placard that said, 'Two pale ales please'. He had a white blazer on and shades and, fuck me, he looked like Elvis."

"Then we became rockabillys and got really into the Stray Cats, This was about 1982. It was my brother and his mates who started brushing their hair up, and me and Sice joined in. It felt like years at the time, but it was probably for 12 to 18 months we became rockabillys. We had our hair piled up, baggy trousers and crepe shoes. I still love the Stray Cats. They had this cartoon image - their hair was much bigger. I had such a crush on Brian Setzer, he's a great singer. But the guitar playing is phenomenal. The B-side is called 'Drink That Bottle Down' - I think it's live in Newcastle - and you've got the double bass player Lee Rocker shouting these blues. It really is a racket, but the guitar playing is unbelievable. The variety and dexterity and fluidity - the ferocity of his guitar playing is wonderful. I was into them for a couple of albums, but by the third album we kind of gave up. My brother got deeper into it - he started getting into psychobilly and all that, The Sharks, Tall Boys, The Meteors, The Milkshakes - all that Klub Foot stuff. And there was a psychedelic wave - The Purple Things and The Vibes - and it all got really strange. I was out of it by then. I think 'Relax' came out and I was back in the modern world."

"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."

"This is another one that really stuck out when I got into psychedelic music. It’s got all the elements. It’s got the distorted, orchestral thing, you’ve got flangers, tape phase and various other production techniques. Again, the vocal is just slightly twee and whimsical, but the rhythm section is like hip-hop. It’s got all of these weird elements, even though, being the late ‘60s, it was way before all of that. There’s stuff in the ‘50s that has phasing and flanging unintentionally, with tape speeds and certainly when they started multi-tracking there was definitely some cases of accidental phasing. But there’s a lot of talk about ‘Rainbow Chaser’ being one of the first examples of a phaser being intentionally used throughout a song. I don’t think there’s a definitive answer to that though. As much as I like this song, I didn’t delve too far down the rabbit hole with Nirvana. It’s very hard with stuff that’s on compilations, because you will go down avenues, but you can’t go down all of them, especially if you’ve got a boxset like the Rubble one, where you’ve got something like six CDs with twenty-odd tracks. I don’t have enough time in the day to do it, and some of it you just can’t get hold of. There probably are pressings of that single with a B-side, or maybe they didn’t do an album that was released. Because, believe it or not, not everything is on Spotify or Apple Music!"

"Cartola is a salty, classic samba character from Rio who I don’t think a lot of people outside of Brazil really know about. I only found out about him through someone I know who married a Brazilian woman and he got super-deep into Samba and its history. “Brazilian music has always been a part of what Grizzly Bear do, especially Tropicalia records, Marcos Valle and Gilberto Gil. All of that stuff has been part of our vocabulary since our early years and in the last couple of years after Shields, I started discovering and getting into straight-up Samba. It isn’t trying to be psychedelic, blast anything open or trying to be crazy, it hits you right in the heart and does exactly what it’s supposed to do. “It’s not trying to blow your mind or anything, it’s just doing what people do in a Samba and it communicates so much. I know a little Portuguese, I don’t speak it well enough to know exactly what he’s saying but you can still feel the vibe and emotion of the song without knowing the words. There’s something so great about music that’s so straight-up in its own vernacular, that’s is exactly what this is and it’s just killing it. “‘Preciso Me Encontrar’ is my favourite track on the record and it’s such a good example of what that music does so well, it’s really honest, as honest as you could possibly be, there’s absolutely zero pretention going on and it’s played beautifully."

"It’s hard for me to narrow it down to my favorite directors and favorite actors, too, but I love Matt Dillon. I love Beautiful Girls and I love Flamingo Kid — he’s responsible for a lot of my favorites, but I’m gonna have to pick Drugstore Cowboy. I saw it when I was a kid and I felt like it was such a different culture than any that I’d ever been exposed to, and I felt like instantly I was a part of it — even though I had no frame of reference. I mean, I wasn’t a “kid,” I was 14 or 15. I had started getting into, you know, that sort of pretentious high school literate phase where you start reading, like, Kerouac and Ginsberg and, I don’t know — I loved that world, that romanticized, thuggy, kind of petty crime world. I really romanticized it myself and just wanted to be a part of that world; there was something exciting about that for me. And I love the way it’s shot. I love the drugged out scenes; I love the way [Gus Van Sant] shoots with cut-outs, those kind of simple, free-floating cut-outs to convey the psychedelic scenes. It was one of my very first exposures to that style of filmmaking that was a lot more patient and took its time and allowed itself to breathe. And from there I got into, like Hal Hartley and the independent movies of the ’90s. But my love of that type of film all started with Drugstore Cowboy."