"I could name a whole lot of well-known artists from anywhere in the world who have made great records but maybe it's more interesting if I pick up on things that I've grown up with that, for geographical reasons, aren't known much outside this particular Welsh language culture. These records aren't talked about everyday in the English language. Someone like Geraint Jarman, with Datyblgu, might be the most powerful Welsh language music [of its time]. He is from a generation earlier [to Datyblgu] and started releasing solo albums in the mid-1970s. He was part of the folk movement in the late-1960s and was in a band with Meic Stevens and Heather Jones called Baramenyn. They were making almost pastiche folk music that was critical of folk music but the records were really popular! They were almost like Os Mutantes without the fuzz! Geraint was a poet first and wrote really good poems like Gil Scott-Heron. He had those skills which he applied to rock music in the mid-1970s. He also had an amazing band who could record an album in a couple of days and an amazing guitarist called Tich Gwilym. This album is like a mid-1970s rock album but informed by punk - Television are in there, too - but it's got that grounding in songwriting from the folk days as well. You can get lost in the guitar playing as well and the lyrics are risqué for the community he was singing to at the time - Wales was quite a religious place in a non conformist way. But it's not kitsch music, it's very much engaging with its day and Geraint grew up in urban Cardiff in a Welsh speaking family but with connections to the Romany world. Like a lot of bands from elsewhere in Wales at the time, he was part of a multi-cultural society, a lot of his friends from school were in reggae bands and he gradually got more and more into reggae. You can hear this in this record but it's also a rock record. By the end of the 1980s, he was playing at Reggae Sunsplash so it's interesting...he was still [singing] in the Welsh language! He's still singing and putting records out. He also pioneered a Welsh television show called Fideo 9 which was like Snub TV or something and he put a lot of energy into that. He was also the voice of the cartoon character Super Ted!"

"The first heard time I heard Roxy Music I was smitten. I was in a record store and I asked the guy ‘What are you playing?’ They used to put the record jackets on the front desk, I picked it up and they looked like a band from outer space. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but I loved everything about it, ‘Virginia Plain’ was just an incredible sounding song. It’s the way the synthesiser bends at the start, then the songs kicks in and Bryan Ferry’s singing is so over the top and melodramatic, I’m not even sure what he’s singing about. There’s those breaks where they jam in the middle, the keyboard and synth solos. It was the sonic template, it sounded completely otherworldly to me. I felt a kinship with Roxy Music. I grew up listening to The Who and The Beatles and they were rock stars, but I felt Roxy Music were sort of my peers. With a lot of the new wave and punk bands I thought ‘I can do this, I can be in bands and do what they’re doing.’ It didn’t sound anything like the classic rock records I’d been listening to, it was arty, very flamboyant and kind of crude in a way. It was a bit pretentious but I liked that, I found it really fresh at the time that they had an art-school approach to the music and yet the music was very DIY, it wasn’t slick. They were great musicians but didn’t sound like virtuoso bands like Yes or Emerson, Lake and Palmer, though I did have some ELP records too! I fell in love with Roxy Music, I bought all their records, their solo records and live bootlegs. I was the self-appointed president of the Roxy Music fan club in Madison, there were only seven members. For a couple of years, once every two months we’d have a ‘Roxython’ on a Saturday night until the sun came up, we’d play their albums and dress up in very flamboyant clothes. It was great."

"There is something faintly off-putting about this book’s subtitle. We live in a world where the obsession with music’s past threatens to overwhelm its present, where the only music magazines that sell in any quantity deal in heritage rock, where virtually the only TV coverage of music comes via retrospective documentaries: the story of modern pop has been told and retold until it’s been reduced to a series of tired anecdotes and over-familiar landmarks. But Yeah Yeah Yeah’s brilliance lies in the personal, idiosyncratic route Bob Stanley takes through the past: for him, the modern pop era begins not with Elvis or “Rock Around the Clock”, but the release of Johnnie Ray’s 1954 album Live at the London Palladium, the first time a screaming teenage audience had been heard on record in the UK. He devotes more space to 1970 one-hit wonders Edison Lighthouse than to Led Zeppelin, delivers a withering verdict on some surprising sacred cows – Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Steely Dan – and is great at unearthing a forgotten quote that challenges what you might call the authorised version of events: at the height of the 1967’s Summer of Love, he finds the Who’s Pete Townshend not boggling at the new frontiers mapped out by psychedelia, but grumpily complaining that “people aren’t jiving in the listening boxes in record shops any more like we did to a Cliff Richard ‘newie’”. Stanley has a way of tackling well-worn topics – not least the Beatles – from unlikely angles, and of talking about artists you’ve never heard of with a contagious enthusiasm that makes hearing them seem like a matter of urgency. Best of all, he makes you laugh out loud while getting directly to the heart of the matter. The lugubrious late 70s output of Pink Floyd sounds like music made by people “who hated being themselves”. The punk-era Elvis Costello sang “like he was standing in a fridge”, and the experience of listening to novelty ska revivalists Bad Manners is “like being on a waltzer when you’ve had three pints and desperately need the toilet”. If you’ve ever heard them, you’ll know exactly what he means."

"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."