"I can't say enough about this album. I heard that when The Stooges came out everyone thought they were retro garage band not realising they were pointing the way forward to punk. Every song on Is This It is amazing. I played 'Modern Age' for my daughter the other day, and just for that song alone it could be one of the greatest albums. I was there for the making of the record and I was so blown away by their dedication to making this perfect music and executing it perfectly every night. It was crazy. These guys would really yell at each other if they missed one chord or beat. They were perfectionists. They were the first band of my age group who were great. There's a level of precision that The Strokes brought to making their music and their approach to it – the way Fab tried to emulate a drum machine in his playing – it feels obvious to people now but it was counter-intuitive at the time, no one had done that. Everything about Is This It was a statement in the opposite direction to what everyone else was doing. Before this the trend was for people make albums that sounded like they were performed in arena, they're soaked with reverb, Is This It is this weird insular record with the distorted vocals. People were confused by the decisions that were made when it was made when it came out, but now you hear it copied infinitely. It's funny that for a band that were criticised for being retro they've now come to define their own times."

"Definitely my favourite song on that record [Yeezus]. I think it's a great record, if you can get past the ""bitches"" and what's that about Chinese pussy? Kanye, fucking grow up man, you're not 15. I was talking to Michael Azerrad, 'cause he's got me to do a couple of podcasts for him. And his clever little thing is to get musicians to review other albums. In conversation, I mentioned this track, and he said he got Lou Reed to write about the record. He said Lou Reed was in tears listening to this track. It's a very emotional track and it's very clever. He switches between making jokes and sounding very desperate indeed. One minute he's being very flippant, and I guess it's like being drunk and not drunk. The drink and the comedown, the hangover, whatever. Really beautiful, but also powerful, and quite punk in a way. And the arrangement is so clever and unexpected and unusual. He'll give you one thing and then give you something quite different, but it all works from section to section. I heard this while I was making What Happens Next and I was really impressed with the synth bass sounds, so I ended up having Thomas [McNeice] in, and we worked out where there would be a mixture of his bass playing and some electronic bass. You know, Lou Reed's point is that Kanye is demonstrating what he can get away with, which is good. I think there's quite a few ""I can do what I like moments"", including talking about ""sweet and sour pussy"" [sic]."

"Sometimes my biggest reasons for connecting to a film are simple, primitive, just about a feeling. Videodrome and Repo Man are two that fit into that category. In addition to the fact that it costars Debbie Harry in my favorite roll of hers, I love Videodrome for its particular use of my hometown, Toronto. Sure, Toronto is used in films all the time, but usually disguised as New York, or Chicago or Detroit. No filmmaker has used Toronto better and more consistently over the years than our hometown hero Cronenberg, though, and Videodrome he shot and set in the downtown Toronto of my childhood, complete with a central part of the story revolving around our local cable station CityTV (as “Civic TV,” the station James Woods’s character, Max Renn, works for), which really did play soft-core porn if you stayed up late enough. To this day, my dad lives on the street Max Renn lives on, and Barry Convex’s Spectacular Optical is a bakery on the same street as the Electric Youth studio downtown, just a minute away, making the connection both past and present. Repo Man has my favorite Criterion release cover art; it’s amazing and designed by movie poster artist Jay Shaw, who also designed the artwork for singles from our album Innerworld. With Repo Man you get Harry Dean Stanton in his first big-screen lead role, Emilio Estevez as his partner, and the streets of Reagan-era Los Angeles set to a classic punk soundtrack. What more would I need to love this film? Nothing. But like with all great Criterion selections, there’s always something new to take from it with every watch."

"Sometimes my biggest reasons for connecting to a film are simple, primitive, just about a feeling. Videodrome and Repo Man are two that fit into that category. In addition to the fact that it costars Debbie Harry in my favorite roll of hers, I love Videodrome for its particular use of my hometown, Toronto. Sure, Toronto is used in films all the time, but usually disguised as New York, or Chicago or Detroit. No filmmaker has used Toronto better and more consistently over the years than our hometown hero Cronenberg, though, and Videodrome he shot and set in the downtown Toronto of my childhood, complete with a central part of the story revolving around our local cable station CityTV (as “Civic TV,” the station James Woods’s character, Max Renn, works for), which really did play soft-core porn if you stayed up late enough. To this day, my dad lives on the street Max Renn lives on, and Barry Convex’s Spectacular Optical is a bakery on the same street as the Electric Youth studio downtown, just a minute away, making the connection both past and present. Repo Man has my favorite Criterion release cover art; it’s amazing and designed by movie poster artist Jay Shaw, who also designed the artwork for singles from our album Innerworld. With Repo Man you get Harry Dean Stanton in his first big-screen lead role, Emilio Estevez as his partner, and the streets of Reagan-era Los Angeles set to a classic punk soundtrack. What more would I need to love this film? Nothing. But like with all great Criterion selections, there’s always something new to take from it with every watch."

"I heard this record in Minus Zero record shop in Portobello Road - it was an old shop that had been there since the early 70s or early 80s, and it stocked a lot of Bob Dylan, Beatles and The Beach Boys. Kind of power-pop albums. I used to go in there to buy Big Star and Big Star-related records, and it was the best place in the UK where I could do that. I'd gotten all the Big Star that I really needed in my life, but I wanted more Alex Chilton records. I asked the store to play me Like Flies On Sherbert. They put it on after saying it was rubbish, and the first thing I heard was the sound of tape stopping and re-starting; the record is full of lots of those sounds. It's a pretty lo-fi, raggedy-sounding record in terms of the production and the performances. It just sounded really unlike anything else I've ever heard before. Really loose and groovy. It's full of life - like a punk record with soul. You can tell that they were probably very high and drunk while they were making it - mistakes and everything are included in it. That's why I made a second About Group record called Start And Complete with Charles Hayward, Pat Thomas and John Coxon, in one day without anyone knowing the songs before we played them. I wanted to capture spontaneity. The record I made with About Group is much softer than this, as my style is very different, but this album is definitely an inspiration on me."

"Basically, after that Ali Hussan Kuban revelation, I started searching high and low for as much of this music as I could possibly find. And then I started looking further. I started googling musicians in the Nile. For me, I found that it was only music from Nubia that had a certain thing about it. Arabic music, from further north, I love it and it's beautiful. I listen to a lot of that but it's more refined than Nubian music. That's not to say that Nubian music isn't sophisticated, but there's something a bit more direct about the Nubian stuff. A bit more punk-rock. I was looking for this music, and I found Mahmoud Fadl. There were these albums called Drummers of the Nile. It's slightly instructional in that they name a rhythm and then they play the rhythm. It's quite a journey through that whole type of music. This track 'Shofna Gamar', it's a pentatonic melody. Jimi Hendrix, the blues, R&B - a lot of stuff comes from pentatonic scales and it feels to me that these Nubian rhythms are the roots of our rhythmic appreciation. One of the big things in Melt Yourself Down was, if I take these ancient rhythms and just change the aesthetic of them so they sound modern, would it feel like modern music? It does. So I came to the conclusion that there's something in these rhythms that we really respond to and I think the same with pentatonic scales, I've always been really drawn to them. So 'Shofna Gamar' is an amazing way of making pentatonic scales feel really fresh, so joyful."

"I went to see them play at the Orchid Ballroom in Purley when they were at the height of their chart success. I always loved Noddy Holder's voice, and they weren't super musicians but Don Powell was a really clever drummer. The parts he'd play were always not what you'd expect to be going on with that song. He always found another way of doing it which was always really cool. Jimmy Lea was always such a great bass player as well, and carried the whole thing. I could take or leave Dave Hill's guitar playing, but at the same time the way Dave Hill plays guitar is very punk in a way. It's very minimalist, very Chuck Berry, with lots of Ernie-Ernie Ernie, you know. He's playing the dynamics rather than the notes. And I went to see them at the Orchid Ballroom in Purley and it was one of the best gigs I've ever been to. It was absolutely infectious. As soon as they started playing it was like you're going to have a good time whether you like it or not. I don't care if you think we're unfashionable, you're still going to enjoy it, which was what happened. And that was the tour that they made that album from. It was the same set: I remember them playing 'Born To Be Wild' and all of those tunes. It was one of those moments, and that album sounds the way I remember that gig. I'm sure there are a few overdubs on there somewhere, but I watched them play that show. Dave Hill threw glitter in my eyes. How could I not have a copy?"

"Fuck, I was so excited when I heard this song. I was staying up late one night - I can’t remember what radio show I was listening to, it was a radio that would play new songs - and I taped it off the radio. It was just so fucking cool, [sings “Dy-Na-Mi-Tee”]. I think that was the first song I heard where I thought ‘I could write a song.’ “After that I did my first ever performance in public. I’d done a school performance before that, but I did a performance with a garage MC who asked me to sing and I was ‘Lady K’ [laughs]. I sang in Croydon at a pub or something and I was doing the garage thing for a bit. That was the biggest music scene at that time in the UK, pirate radio was bigger than normal radio. I would go clubbing in Watford, I would grind in the clubs and I would get CDs from the DJs there who would have all new stuff. “That sort of reminds me of punk in a way, it was just kids in their bedrooms and they were running the clubs. I felt Ms. Dynamite did something really meaningful and she felt like a political artist to me. I don’t think I knew that at the time, but I think that’s why I was drawn in by her. I was looking at lyrics in a different way then too, thinking about the world a lot and wanting to help the world, maybe being political and not realising it. I wanted to write about the fucked up shit in the world."