"I first saw this in Detroit— I was seventeen, it was 1975. We lit up our Colombian spliffs, along with everyone else in the theater, an all-smoking venue. I’d never listened to reggae before. I’d never seen a movie where the hero is last pictured in a rain of gunfire, still blasting his pistol, the immortal prince. I hid my eyes from many of the scenes of cruelty: the sadistic pastor assigned to “care” for our young Ivan, the vicious corruption of the record companies, dope kingpins and government goons—who seem to be one and the same. When Ivan punctuates his overdue revenge strokes with a knife with “Don’t. Fuck. With. Me!”—I wondered if I’d draw another breath."

"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!"

"Pasteur Lappé is a guy from Cameroon who was making music in the late ’70s, and “Sanaga Calypso” was on this collection of experimental African funk music. The first time I heard this song, it reminded me so much of the Clash’s Sandinista! The Clash were obviously influenced by dub and reggae, and they paid homage to those styles very openly and respectfully, but to hear something that reminded me of a song like “Charlie Don’t Surf”—dancey, soulful, very beautiful, and kind of elegiac—it just made me smile. I literally said, “Joe Strummer for sure heard this song!” I like building a small lineage between my own listening experience and the listening experience of somebody I’ve been inspired by, and that’s what this song does for me. It puts me back in the sphere of influence. And it’s catchy."

"I first started listening to The Slits when I was about 8, with my friend Antonia, and we stole all her brother's Slits records and used to dance around the room pretending we were the Slits. I just picked this because I'm sure it was a huge part of my life. If I could have been any kind of singer, I would have been a punk - I thought I was a little punk growing up! I wanted to be in The Slits, I wanted to be that kind of a woman, but I grew up to be a folk singer, and that's alright too - I like that. It's just the attitude - I hear The Slits and I'm immediately back in that time. It was a one-off period, it was an exciting time and they kind of encapsulated a sense of anarchic joy. The songs are fucking fantastic as well. There's that ska element, punk, reggae and they're British and they're fantastic. I don't know if there's ever been anyone like them since."

"I’d never seen the Stooges as early punks or anything—that’s media manipulation of facts; I loved them, but I was always appalled with their long hair. By this time my record collection was enormous and expanding, and my tastes were extremely varied. During the punk years, I really loved the Raincoats and X-Ray Spex and the Adverts, groups that were doing things way out on their own. There was plenty of experimentation going on musically in all areas, particularly reggae.” “I lack prejudice except for music that I find to be reminiscent of somebody else’s work—I find no need for endless Chuck Berry versions, which was very popular at the time. And I had little time for what was coming out of America; bands like Television never really grabbed me, I just couldn’t connect. It was all too clever for its own good and wrapped up in too much Rimbaud poetry: Get over it and write about your own life, not what you find in books."

"If I was trying to be cool I’d say Bitches Brew, but this is the seminal album really, isn’t it? The great Coltrane’s on it. It was an astonishing band. It had such a tone to it. For a lot of music that I love, whether it’s dub reggae or electronics or classical or choral music, it’s about soundscape, it’s about tone. I can link the Burial album into Kind Of Blue. A few years ago somebody gave me a very high definition LaserDisc – it was next generation after LaserDisc. It was of Kind Of Blue and it had been remastered. It sounded like the sounds had separated off and they were no longer mashing together as was intended. And it sounded horrible and soulless. I just took it off and never played it again. This is real fusion of sound, though it’s not fusion jazz, and the sounds cross over each other and complement each other so beautifully. It’s the perfect soundscape. It’s another wardrobe in my head."

"I got really into reggae music in high school. Her vocals, her phrasing, everything taught me so much about how to put emphasis on different syllables, the way to punctuate things, making something sound extremely effortless when it wasn't. She's having fun and goofing around but I know that it takes a lot of work to make it sound like that. That was something that really appealed to me, wanting things to sound alive, effortless and fun while still touching on heavy issues. She just has a fucking great voice, as a singer she's just inspirational. I hadn't started doing anything yet, that was before college, I probably didn't own the album to be honest, I just taped stuff off the radio. I couldn't afford to buy a lot of records and my parents never had a lot of records. We'd buy singles at this place called Roxy Maxis for 99 cents. I taped all of the stuff on cassette so I'm sorry that I didn't pay for it."