"You asked for albums, but albums are already a bit away from pop because of they're a more serious proposition, so all of these are albums that I own on vinyl, and because I'm of a certain age that's what I think of as a record. We didn't have a big record collection in our house when I was growing up, but my mum had three Beatles albums, Sgt Pepper, Revolver and Abbey Road. Even though I was a kid I could tell that Sgt Pepper and Revolver sounded like music that had happened a while ago, but Abbey RoadM sounded more modern. It still does sound quite modern, because on second side where all the songs run into each other, that's quite a thing, not many people had done that since and not many have since. There's an art to an album. If you've got an album that's got a shit song on it, especially if it's in the middle of a side, you're not going to play it as much because you know you're going to have to get up and skip that track. That's what I've tried to do with these, it's records that I don't mind putting on then you can relax or talk to people or whatever, but you know you're not going to get some kind of fucking horrible shitty stinker of a song on it. Abbey Road - I was young at the time, 10, 11, 12, whatever, and the track that ends side one, 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' that was mind-blowing to me, the way it went on and on and on at the end, with this big synthy wooshy noise. I've since found out its Ringo playing this machine that sounds like wind that you get in classical orchestras. It was a psychedelic experience in a living room in a normal part of Sheffield in the early 70s, where, you know, psychedelic experiences weren't that common. I'll always remember it, that song in particularly took me somewhere. And that's the end of that side - if you had Abbey Road on CD it wouldn't be right, it only really works as a statement if you listen to it for ages and then it suddenly stops and then you're left in silence for a while until you can be bothered to get up and start again. I started with this because it plays with what an album can be. It's great.
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"When I got into psychedelic music in my late teens and early twenties this was one of those songs that left a big impression on me. It’s not a song that would have been on a Nuggets collection or anything, it was quite a big song. It wasn’t a rare find or an unusual one-hit wonder, but the melody in it still blows me away. “It’s very, very British-sounding. There’s something very whimsical about it and there’s a little darkness in there but it’s incredibly uplifting - just the chords, the way it’s played and everything about it. It’s definitely been an inspiration when it comes to writing chord changes for me. “The Zombies have an incredible collection of songs so it’s very hard to choose just one, but apart from ‘Time of the Season’ this is a track where I would’ve been “Wait, how do I know this song?” There’s no pretentiousness to ‘Care of Cell 44’. or any of their songs in fact. There’s something very honest about it. Even though they’re very musically-minded and clever, it’s not distracting to listen to. It leaves you intrigued, more than bewildered. “Some bands get too clever with their chord changes, to the point where they’re not memorable, all of the sections of this song work so well together, but it’s not straight-up. It’s a pop song but there’s definitely some underlying eeriness to it. I don’t know whether it’s just the chords or the way it’s recorded. Maybe it’s something in the reverbs as well - the chambers, they just sound so good"

"Discharge do write short pop songs. They're like punk rock haiku. I love Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing and still listen to it regularly. To me it's not only a great punk rock record it's also a very psychedelic record, which may not seem normal to most people. Of all the records I ever listened to while tripping on acid, this is the one that sounded the best. You'd think with the lyrics and the cover that it would be a scary proposition. It was more like getting wrapped up in the sound. The guitars sounded like they were in a hall of mirrors, there are so many layers bouncing back and forth. You can almost kind of view the whole record as one long song, or a piece with these little movements. I've obviously thought about it way too much while tripping on acid! From that era - the early 80s - I was really into Discharge, Crass, Zounds, some of the other Crass bands, but a lot of the other stuff like Peter And The Test Tube Babies seemed really dumb to me and weak. I didn't get into Oi! bands. They'd tend to have these dumb singalong choruses and chanting and the guitar parts always seemed to be like ""the box"" - a four-fret pattern. Of course I loved a lot of the earlier UK punk rock bands. That's a problem with these lists where you have to think of thirteen albums. I can't fit The Damned in there, I can't fit Pere Ubu. I could but I'd have to take something out and all these records are equally important to me. It's like choosing between children or favourite grandparents!"

"The avant-garde comes to the mainstream. At the time, Terry Riley was an avant-garde composer. He still is, but he's probably more so known for his work in the late '60s. Indian music at the time was coming into focus because of The Beatles and psychedelic music. So his compositions - especially this one - were really hypnotic, very mantra-esque. I think Terry Riley influenced more in a pop sense than in a rock sense, and I think A Rainbow In Curved Air has probably equal influence to Sgt. Pepper's. And you can quote me on that! It's obviously where The Who got the name 'Baba O'Riley', where the band used synthesisers - that's from Terry Riley. We cut our teeth in Buffalo, NY, in the early '80s and in that time the place was at the height of avant-garde. They opened a music school where they featured all the greats - Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Tony Conrad - just a ton of avant-garde composers, who later became more famous. It was such a central point for the electronic avant-garde movement, one that hadn't been around since San Francisco in the late '60s. It influences everything that Grasshopper and I do. We have strange polarities of the melancholy, romantic side of us. Then we also have the avant-garde side of us. The rock & roll side of us is probably the least prominent in our music. One of our albums, Snowflake Midnight, is also our homage to that bygone era of electronic music. Once you put it on, you think, ""Oh that's where all that William Orbit and Moby stuff comes from."" If you look all the way back, that's Terry Riley. It was the beginning of synthesisers, arpeggio synths also, which eventually became modern dance music. It was his motif of making it more hypnotic."

"When I did ‘Setting Sun’ with The Chemical Brothers it was based loosely on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Do you remember when it went to number one, what song we knocked off the top? ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’ by Deep Blue Something. We were like Sir Galahad. 'And she said, 'What about Breakfast At Tiffany's' and I said, ‘I remember the movie.'' And we came in, 'Off with your head you piece of shit.' Revolver was when the sitars really started to come in with The Beatles, and all the backwards stuff on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. It’s their first drug album. The drums sound great on it and it’s a masterclass of how to make guitar pop. That’s just it. They took what the Beatles had been, they did Revolver and then the next week they’re making ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. They’re a completely different band. It’s a cliché to talk about it now because it’s so well-known but this is a mindblowing album. I went to see the premiere of the George Harrison film the other night [Martin Scorsese documentary Living In The Material World] and on the red carpet outside this journalist asked me this question: 'Would you say that The Beatles have been an influence on your music?' I was that amazed I had to take my shades off. I said, 'Is that a serious question?' And he was only young and in all innocence he said, 'Yes. Why?' I was like, 'Are you having me on?' And he was like, 'No.' Now ignoring the fact that it’s me, if you’re in a band and you’re playing guitar, you have been influenced by The Beatles. That really is all you need to know. The psychedelic stuff they did after this was mindblowing and the Fab Four mop top stuff before this was equally as good but on this record it all came together."

"There was a record store in the Times Square subway station, and another one on 42nd Street, both of which had big “international sections,” as they called it. It included everything from the rest of the world, all on vinyl, but with no information. You’d look at the cover and go, What’s this like? It was a total crapshoot. But occasionally, I’d hear something that would blow my mind, like a Fela Kuti record; the first one I picked up was called Expensive Shit, and obviously I picked that up because of the title. The covers were the best—like Cambodian pop records with a bunch of people in traditional garb, all holding electric guitars—and you’d look at them for clues. You’d think, What in the world could that be? You’d buy it, and it would be pretty cool. In 1986, I did a fiction film called True Stories. I guess you would call it a musical comedy. We were doing the mixing in San Francisco, so I’d go down to the big Tower Records on North Beach and go to the international section. One day, I came back with a whole bunch of Brazilian records, because I had maybe heard of a couple of the artists, but didn’t really know what their records were like. One was a Caetano Veloso record called Muito, and then there was a Milton Nascimento record, and probably a Gilberto Gil record, and those blew my mind. They had elements that were psychedelic and that had a Brazilian feel. They were really beautiful, but then I dug a little bit more and found out they were also really political. These guys had been exiled, thrown in jail. I was connecting with it, and I realized that my generation didn’t know any of this music. So I asked our record label, “Can we license this music, and can I make a compilation of my favorite cuts?” That one record led to another one: There was a Brazilian series, then a Cuban series, because Cuban music had not been available in the United States for decades. And I started my own label, Luaka Bop."

"I really like to do covers, but the idea of a children's choir doing such classic songs and interpreting them… In 'Space Oddity' there's 'ding!', one vibraphone hit that's totally out of time and a tambourine will go at the same moment and then there's "ground control to Major Tom", these little kids - you can imagine them being really stoic and really getting behind what they were singing and being so serious about it. And then there's little jangly guitars that are so 70s as well, you can almost hear the school wall. People would do anything now to record an album that sounded like it was in a 70s school, but that wasn't them trying to be cool, that was them being who they were and what they were doing. And then 'Desperado', there's a nine-year-old girl who sings, like the quietest voice I've ever heard, but they've mic'ed it up so well. I purposefully try sometimes to mic up my voice really quietly so it sounds like you're being told a secret. This little girl, her voice is shaking, but it's the most gentle sound - it's like when a little child reaches up and touches your face, that feeling of… it's called Innocence & Despair - they're absolute innocents, but they're also singing songs like 'Desperado' and "oh Mandy, you came and you gave without taking and I pushed away", but it's seven-, ten-, 12-year-olds singing. 'Space Oddity', the fact that that's about a spaceman just stuck out in space just drifting away, and they do make it sound quite psychedelic and eccentric and funny. And the shambolicness of it is so cool. What I like is that so many people try to do that, that faux-childishness, and this guy who was running it was obviously a passionate, avid music lover of that time, and persuaded the school and the parents to let these kids sing pop music, which then was pushing boundaries. It's beautiful. He [Hans Fenger, organiser/arranger of project] really managed to pull something together. I think it all comes down to the beauty of being not self-aware. They're aware, they're trying their best, but it's like the older you get I suppose the more you feel nostalgic about those times and that feeling. Picasso and Matisse and great artists have always been trying to get back to childhood. You get to a certain stage and you want to revisit, but trying to keep that childhood alive is almost the hardest thing, because you build up all these layers of self-awareness and what you want to project and how you want to do it. Even now when I watch Glee and all that shit, all these kids have got the dance routines down - I'm sad that there's no one being this shit anymore. You should be a bit shit when you're little, because that's the freedom. Having perfectly scaled voices, and projecting, and knowing how to communicate with your audience. It's just like, "really? Is that what it's about or is this what it's about?": a bunch of kids getting together, loving it and making mistakes and not caring and sounding a bit out of tune. "I'm going to play my vibraphone part, it's in the wrong place, but I loved it, I'm going to do it again!" Just one note, in the wrong place, amazing. You're playing David Bowie and you're seven, what more is there?"