"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."

"When I was young I always dug listening to live concerts. It was like we were there. I always think that live albums are a good way to represent a body of work anyway because it shows the songs as part of a collection better than, say, a greatest hits record. It wasn't so much that Cheap Trick At Budokan was live, it was more the selection of songs. Rick [Nielsen] was really an amazing showman as a guitar player as far as the tricks that he did were concerned. Plus, the power that he had despite being essentially a three-piece rhythm outfit was amazing. Then you had Tom [Petersson] with his twelve-string bass… Whoever thought someone would play something like that? I could have done without some of the squealing but having gone to Japan so much; I get it. That's their way of showing you that they loved you. I never really considered Cheap Trick to be a glam rock band. People forget that Rick used to have long hair before he transitioned to having short hair and wearing baseball caps when they supported KISS in 1977. Take a song like 'Hello There'. It has such a killer, punk rock attitude. It reminds me of Mötley Crüe doing a song like 'Live Wire': you don't expect that kind of aggression and when you hear it you think, ""Alright, you dudes can let it rip when you want to.""

"Sister Lovers is one of the most beautiful records. It's probably the record I've listened to more than any other. It's just a damaged and fractured, beautiful, plaintive, poetic record. And it still retains its sense of mystery. When we first went to Memphis we met Jim Dickinson [producer] and I asked him loads of questions on how he recorded Sister Lovers. We actually went to the studios where they recorded the album twice. We were absolutely obsessed by that record. Dickinson told stories about the recording process and allowing Alex Chilton to be himself. There's no one like them in the rock canon. There's a lot of pain in the record, a howl, anguish and pain. It's the sound of defeat. But there's also a duality of victory and defeat too, which is really rare in music but it makes it so appealing and attractive. Alex Chilton could go from The Box Tops to Big Star – the first two albums were pop rock, Byrds-y commercial songs. Then, he made Sister Lovers, which was like an art record. Pure art. There's nothing commercial about it. No one would release it. It was recorded in '74 to '75 and was released in 1978, after punk. This was because he was ahead of his time. It's only in the last 15 to 20 years that people have picked up on Sister Lovers. A record like no other."

"I’m going to take us from otherworldly right back into the world itself, to my teenage years. I guess you could say this about nearly all of these songs, but this one in particular got me for the same reason that The Catcher in the Rye gets people, the idea of ‘us versus them’, the real, sincere people pitted against the phonies of the world. “As a teenager I could have written The Catcher in the Rye, nearly any teenager could. At some point you feel yourself isolated against this outside world and The Chameleons were a band, lyrically and musically, that kept ringing this same set of isolated chimes of the individual pitted against this hostile world. Heading into my teenage years I was like everyone, looking for someone that can say something better than you can until you can say it better than they can, and for a while The Chameleons could say it better in song than I could speak it myself. “With ‘Second Skin’ they had the lexicon and the guitars that I loved. It was a sort of musical version of The Catcher in the Rye, of someone trying to make sense of a very perplexing, and at times hostile world that I think all teenagers find themselves in and I was no exception. For some people it was punk rock and for others it was other elements of entertainment, but for me it had a lot to do with music and in The Chameleons I found a direct way of saying it and not in the blunt, abject anger that punk rock sometimes wielded. I didn’t feel it like that, mine was much more of a pointed knife than a blunt nightstick. “It’s even something that people say to us, that they grew up listening to Mercury Rev or Deserter’s Songs. When you’re writing, it’s coming out of you but sometimes you forget that for people who are listening to it when they’re thirteen or fourteen, it’s their lexicon, it’s a newly learned vocabulary. That’s where sometimes as an artist you forget the importance of what you do, because music is what carried you to the point of doing it later in life. “Everyone has one song or a band that seem to take the words out of your young, teenage mouth before you could form them and for The Chameleons were one of those bands."

"This reminds me of my dad. He was into liberation drum circles in the Matabele community in Zimbabwe and he worked with people from that community. This is a record from the Ndebele language. Nothembi is an amazing guitarist and it's a rocking album with amazing synths as well. I've been playing this quite a bit over the past year. I almost got to play with her but she didn't turn up. My dad used to listen to Thomas Mapfumo - who supported The Stone Roses at Spoke Island - and I thought this was really funny [at the time] - I should have asked my dad to come along to that gig! My influences for music were more down to my big brother and sister and my mam was into different music again. It's inevitable that you are influenced by people around you. I'd get Anglo-American punk rock and pop music from my brother and sister but my dad wasn't into that; [for him] reggae was acceptable and maybe Welsh language pop. He didn't engage with music to the point where he had influenced my sound whereas my brother and sister's records influenced me directly."