"I remember hearing 'Requiem' on college radio, and it really combined all of my favourite things - it had synths on it, really heavy distorted guitars, tribal drums, this crazy jazz drummer and punk rock vocals. The first album is great, but What's This For is one of those rare albums where the second is actually better. I remember when it came out I went to the record store the week of release, though I couldn't afford to buy it, and looking at the cover and how beautiful it was. It was this collage, with these psychedelic, apocalyptic colours, and the title is one of those great titles where it meant nothing but it was captivating. What are they asking, I don't understand. Standing in the record store, holding this piece of vinyl, hoping that one day I'd be able to buy it... when I finally got it home, the sound quality was even better than the first album, and it just had this sinewy darkness to it that was really amazing. Everything about them from the basslines to the drumming to the way they approach guitar and lyrics... it was the first time I'd ever heard really heavy distorted guitar that the way they were mixed they didn't dominate the music, the fit perfectly within the framework of the song."

"When I think about why I love Queen my head just fills with every single Queen song that I know by heart. It's just like a box of Quality Street. Everything is amazing. The reason that I've chosen the second album is because the song 'Ogre Battle' is on there, which is one of my favourite tracks. It's rare that you struggle to label a band. If you're a heavy metal band you're meant to look and sound like a heavy metal band but you can't really call Queen anything. They could be a pop band one day or the band that wrote 'Bicycle Race' the next and a full-blown metal band the next. In terms of the depth of the musical landscape that they covered, it was very similar to some extent to the Beatles. I mean 'Helter Skelter' was a pretty heavy track, and 'Yellow Submarine' really wasn't. I think Queen have a lot of similar ingredients. Everybody was writing the songs as well, so Freddie was writing differently to John Deacon, and then John was writing differently to Roger [Taylor, drummer]. They were all accepting each other though, and nobody was sat there saying that they couldn't do something because it didn't sound like Queen. If it was a good song they'd record it, and this album is nothing but good songs. It's a style that we've tried to adopt into Judas Priest. A good song is a good song at the end of the day, and there's no point in wasting time arguing about whether Priest are supposed to sound like the British Steel record or the Painkiller record or whatever. I felt such a sense of loss when Freddie died, but he fucking loved his life. He partied like a maniac. I've lost a lot of friends to AIDS and it's such a terrible thing to have to suffer through. Such a cruel condition to be taken by. From what I've seen and heard there's a horrible sense of loss in those early days. There was a lot of rejection and almost pariah-like status heaped upon you by people. And it's still around today, which is so sad and unfair. It's interesting though, because I don't know if Freddie would still have been doing what he did now. Would he still be going out on the road with Brian and Roger, who, by the way, I love? Especially Adam [Lambert]. But Freddie would have been 70-something I think, and I get a feeling that at some point, he would have just said, "I've had enough now darling." We lost him, but he left behind such an incredible legacy and canon of work. I listen to Queen almost every day still."

"""Ben Vida is a composer and sound artist whose work I really love. This record he did pairing his idiosyncratic electronic voice with percussion is a favourite. I suppose everyone I have given on this list has a strong character. The thing I love about Ben too is that he's so good at synthesising sounds and he has such a strong compositional voice. But his music has such a great sense of humour too – some of the sounds are absurd. They are really high quality, well made objects, but in a lot of ways it's so funny. I'm always excited to listen to anything that Ben does. And it's great to get a chance to work with him too. He's been a long time collaborator. I also sought him out to work with me as a performer on my HIVE project. When I first started the project, it was this installation where there were these five wooden mushroom-like pods. It's a piece for three percussionists and two modular synths. Being a fan of his music and having known him for a couple of years, I asked him to do that with me. And so we ended up touring that around together. I ended up adding some vocals to some records that he did. He did a record called Slipping Control a couple of years ago, that I worked on with him. So it's been a very rich creative relationship."""

"I ended up with this record because it was at that point in my teenage years when I was swapping records with my mates at school. We were all a long-haired, Afghan coat-wearing gang into Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and all those classic rock guitar bands. And Santana were almost amongst that; even when you go to albums like Abraxas and the early albums, they have a quite exotic kind of quality about them, so when Welcome came out, it was really rejected by the gang. It was like, ""Whoah! They've gone too far! What is this nonsense? We don't understand it!"" I got someone else's copy of it and I really started to sink into it. There are so many signposts in this record to the jazz world that has sustained me through the years. The first time I heard the words ""John Coltrane"" was through this record. Alice Coltrane is on the first track, which is this version of Dvořák's 'Going Home', which is adapted from his New World Symphony. It's like a classical piece played on a Mellotron. It's very dramatic and it's got nothing to do with rock music and more to do with that spiritual jazz that Alice Coltrane was knocking about. At that point, you couldn't give Alice Coltrane records away, and it's interesting that they didn't really gain currency until the late 90s. And then you've got people like Leon Thomas on the record, the guy who did the yodeling on Pharoah Sanders' records, which would lead you to his records. And John McLaughlin is on there, which would then lead you to The Mahavishnu Orchestra. Back then, you'd find these names on records and then when you were in the record shop, you'd find these names again and it all connected up like dot-to-dots. The concept of ""fusion"" throws up so many bad images because there's a load of shit there, but there's also so much good stuff as well. With this album, I opened the door expecting that rock guitar thing, but the sound of this record is fascinating: it has so much air in it and you can hear the sound of the room being pushed around. To me, this record is like audio sunshine and it transports me to some transcendental place."