"Lisa Helps the Blind were Belle and Sebastian before they were Belle and Sebastian, a very early incarnation of the band when it was mainly the two Stuarts - Murdoch and David. I used to put on bands at this place in Glasgow called The 13th Note, there’d be a Tuesday night where anybody could play and then a Thursday night for groups who maybe were a little bit more together. “Stuart Murdoch came down a couple of times and he’d sometimes play at acoustic nights there too. I think I put on one show when they were still Lisa Helps the Blind. What I remember more than anything else was how quietly Stuart would sing, to the point that you could barely hear him over the general level of chatter in the room. I think he was very frustrated at the time, because it wasn’t in his nature to make a scene and force people to listen; he wanted them to pay attention because they appreciated the songs, you know? He was clearly a great melodic songwriter, but that track especially... “I’ve got that demo tape somewhere, in a box and it’s been there for the last two or three times I’ve moved house. I wish I could find the bloody thing because I love that version of the song. It’s quite different from the Belle and Sebastian recording that came out later, on the 3...6...9 Seconds of Light EP. I don’t want to diss that version, but the Lisa Helps the Blind one was slower and felt a little bit more lovingly crafted. I just thought, ‘Whoa, there’s something special going on here with this guy and his writing.’ “The lyrics weren’t like anything I’d heard before - the imagery he was using was both extremely profound and extremely non-rock and roll, this song from the perspective of a guy who’s going to church and fantasising about this rather plain-looking girl who is resenting being in church herself. I fell in love with the quirkiness and contrariness of it, but there was also a quiet self-assurance to it that I’ve admired about Stuart ever since. “I was in one of Belle and Sebastian’s early press photos too, they didn’t appear in them themselves in those early days. That was a very specific time in 1996, after Tigermilk and before If You’re Feeling Sinister. Stuart just stopped me on Byres Road one day, when I was out on my bike. I look so chuffed, because I loved that bike more than anything else in the world. I took a train out to Helensburgh and bought it from this guy who’d bought it new in 1948 and cycled to work on it every day of his life until he retired. It was this really heavy, beautiful old Raleigh. “I was away on tour one time and the landlady of my flat on Bank Street in Glasgow cleared out the garage and she chucked it out. It was so heart-breaking! Anyway, the photo is from a period when the band were being bashful but also playing games with the press at the same time, which was funny. Stuart was a great photographer, you’d always see him around town with his camera.”"

"The thing about that record is that it had an honesty that rock & roll had been missing. The 80s were a terrible time when guitars didn't sound like guitars and there were drum machines, but then all of a sudden here comes this group, Guns N' Roses who plug in their guitars and just didn't mess around with any fancy stuff. And the songs were undeniable! 'Welcome To The Jungle' is an undeniable song in the same way that 'Satisfaction' has that great riff with the lyrics on top of it. Great lyrics, great imagery, and as soon as you heard that high-pitched voice that harkened back to a Robert Plant-ish approach to singing, which hadn't been heard in quite a while… Well, it still works today. That's got to be coming up to 30 years old, but you put that on today if it was a brand new band, I would say, 'Who's that?' That intro is almost symphonic, and it just defined the band. You hear that song, and then the rest of the album follows through. 'Welcome To The Jungle' is head, hands and feet above the other material. Bands have a few songs that just stand up, you know? You think Thin Lizzy, you think 'The Boys Are Back In Town'. You think the Stones, you think 'Satisfaction'. You think Led Zeppelin, you think 'Stairway To Heaven'. There are just certain songs that, either because of the melody or lyric or the sound of the song, intrinsically say, ""This is what that is"". The only band who doesn't have that thing, just because they have so many god damn good songs, is The Beatles. I don't know if [us influencing them] is the case. We never paid attention to anything. There can be scenes or not and people can be influenced or not, but at the end of the day you are left to your own devices. When you think about it, The Beatles were influenced by Motown, The Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, etc. but then when you hear The Beatles, it's their own stuff. It's like cooks. Everybody uses salt, everybody uses vegetables, there is nothing unique, but how you mix up those elements makes it yours or not. If you can grab a style, I think it has to do with talent. Everybody cooks, but few people are cooks."

"I liked Jerry Lee Lewis, because my dad turned me on to him, so I had this collection of all the Sun sessions that I would listen to a lot. I mainly just listened to 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On'. I used to love that line, ""got the bull by the horns"", I used that line in 'He's Alright', my song from a long time ago. It's so bluesy and goofy and from a wild man. But then at a later period, I read that book The Dark Stuff by Nick Kent. Adam [Granduciel], my buddy, one of my best friends, from The War On Drugs, he sent it to me for my birthday, which was nice. He wasn't even around, but he sent it to me. Anyway, I couldn't put that down. He knew I would like that book. The best article [in there], is on Jerry Lee Lewis, who's just a notorious maniac and is obviously an incredible piano player. In that article, he talked about a book, a biography about him by Nick Tosches called Hellfire and this book is off the hook, it's unreal. So just around that time I found the vinyl of this one, the Sun Sessions, maybe it's volume one, again I burned it and cranked it in the 'phones and played it a lot when I was driving around LA. There's a song, 'Little Queenie', which is a cover, but he says: ""She's too cute to be a minute over 17"" and I morphed that line in 'Pretty Pimpin': ""a little too cute to be admitted under marbles lost"". Whatever that part of the song is, the first time I say: ""All I want is to just have fun, live my life like a son of a gun"", but it's like a morphed version of that Seeds song, 'Pushin' Too Hard', like [sings]: ""All I want is to just have fun, live my life like it just begun"", so it's sort of referencing those old guys, two different eras. Obviously, if I had to pick one, Jerry Lee Lewis slays The Seeds. But it's just like that down-home, real rock & roll. How do you explore his back catalogue? I think you just start with the early stuff. He had a crazy career, because he had all these hits young and then he married his super young cousin, but he was totally in love with her and she was, and then they went to Europe and during that time they found out it was his cousin and then he was banned everywhere, basically. Then he had a resurgence, he started doing country music and was bigger than ever, so he would always go up and down, but he was a maniac. He would just always be battling demons. He would go back to Jesus. He would go to church where they would speak in tongues, he would just live extreme lives. He would go back and forth, lose his mind, take a million pills, play shows and his hair was flying around, playing with his foot. I mean, he was a bad motherhumper, as you would say!"

"I didn’t really know about ABBA when I was growing up, they’re one of those bands you think you’d get into through your parents, but my parents didn’t listen to them. I think the first time I heard them properly was in Muriel’s Wedding, obviously that wasn’t a cool thing so they became a kind of guilty pleasure, but when Mamma Mia! came out in my late teens I was ‘Damn, all of these songs are so fucking good.’ “I have this list of songs in my head that I think are perfect, obviously that’s completely subjective, but they’re untouchable pop masterpieces like ‘God Only Knows’, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and ABBA have so many of them. There’s a humanity in their songs but they also feel like ‘how could anyone have made something so perfect?’ The writing, the production, the arrangements, even the way their voices sound, it has the same effect as when siblings sing. Their voices are unbelievable, sometimes I think ‘is that a weird harmony?’ but it’s just the way their voices sound together, it’s incredible. “This song makes me well up because it’s so perfect, but it’s also so silly, it makes me want to throw my hands in the air, I want to dance when I hear it and I want to smile. You feel silly when you hear it, you feel camp and like a character in Muriel’s Wedding or Mamma Mia! when it comes on. It’s an amazing feeling and that is the power music isn’t it? “The other thing you have to remember is that one of the things that made The Beatles so amazing and such an interesting proposition and a reason why people really like The Velvet Underground as well, is because they changed the way songs were written, they rewrote the rulebook. Before then all music essentially sounded the same, everyone was using the same three or four chords and melodies, that kind of Rockabilly and Rock and Roll, all operating in the same framework, even the blues, The Stones and The Beach Boys, until they started breaking the rules too. But ABBA were making this music only ten or twenty years after pop music as we know it began to exist and it’s so innovative. “You know when people talk about their favourite bands? They’re a band who if you’re in a car, someone could put on an hour of ABBA and I’d like every song and there’s bands who I consider to be my favourite bands who I couldn’t say that about. It’s banger after banger, I guess it depends what mood you’re in, actually I was listening to them in a car the other day and someone told me to turn it off! “It’s mind-bending how good they are when they’re at their best. I think music is more often than not written about as art, but it’s also entertainment and whilst what they do is this incredible art it’s also so entertaining. It’s funny, we’ve been speaking about music for the last half an hour but this is the first time where we’ve talked about music making us happy and that’s really important. Music should make you happy and ‘Dancing Queen’ definitely does that."

"I almost forgot about this one. It’s funny how easy it is to miss the things right in front of you, but this record, more than any other, is the most loved record of my life. I know it’s a compilation, not a proper album, etc, but all LPs are compilations of sorts and many of the songs on here didn't appear on LPs. Also, the LPs of that early era were stuffed full of covers that could have been played by anyone, so this is the most representative.
 
I’ve listened to it as a record all my life. The copy I picture right now is the copy that was in the flip-down compartment of my parents’ Grundig stereogram that they got as a wedding present. Like Angel Delight, the Ford Cortina, G-Plan furniture or Clark’s shoes, this LP was a ubiquitous object of their generation: a part of everyone’s life. That’s what it was to me as a kid – part of my life. It was my first taste of music, before I could speak, before I could describe what I was listening to. It’s still with me and I will always listen to it until I’m dead. It is part of life.
 
The context around this music has changed for me. When I was a toddler I had no idea how it came into existence. It was just there. Then I realised it was people who made it. Then I idolised them. Then I reckoned Lennon was probably a prick. Then I realised he was just a guy who wrote good songs, but became too rich and famous for his mental health.
 
I picked this rather than one of this band’s famous albums, even though each has such a strong identity, as it means so much to me. I know there are complexities of ideas, ground-breaking experimentation, revolutionary themes and era-defining moments elsewhere, but this is what defined me. It’s also their best period. It starts with 'Please Please Me'. It ends with 'Paperback Writer'. That’s The Beatles for me. Well, my Beatles. Well, The Beatles on the front cover. There’s that other band peering through their moustaches and beards from the back cover with the same name. Yeah, I love that band too, but not in the same way. The Red Album is the purest record ever made. I don’t know what it is – rock & roll, rock, pop, faux classical… I don’t care. I know the context, I know what it is and I know that nothing has ever or will ever be as great, just as I did when I was a toddler."

""This is by far the most important record for me. I heard it when I was 16. I was in a boarding school for boys, which was like a Victorian prison. One evening, I was told by the housemaster – who hated me – to take a phone call. It was my mum, who tells me that my dad was on the verge of dying and was having an operation that night. The operation may save him, but he is old and he might not wake up from the anaesthetic. I am told that I couldn't go home and that I just have to wait it out. At ten o'clock, the boarding school have 'lights out'. I am lying on my bed, in a state. I'm not going to be able to sleep, so I sneak through the corridors, down through the study to the one thing that redeems my life, which is the stereo system. Horses is there and I have no idea why I put it on. The first track I play ['Birdland'] is about a father dying, and a long, black funeral car and a boy standing watching. It is a nine-minute improvisational piece about Wilhelm Reich dying and his son, Peter, helping his father through the death process. This song shook me to the core, partly because it was improvised – it has no structure of verses or a chorus – and is just this rambling poem of desperation and longing. I think, from that moment on, I subconsciously knew I wanted to be a singer. I wanted to be somebody who could write a song that a boy or girl 5,000 miles away could hear and be moved so much that it would change his or her life. Therefore Horses became my template, probably by chance, because something so powerful happened to me on the night I first heard it. I then bought tickets to see her play and my parents banned me from going. I had to run away from home to go and see her show, and I was quite a good boy, so it was an unusual act for me. I had a couple of amazing things happen later in my life. Lenny Kaye, who had been a guitar player in her band, became the godfather to my eldest son. He also produced James' first record [Stutter]. Then, after Patti had been retired for a while, Lenny rang me from Detroit and told me that Patti was going to do her first gig in 15 years. He said that she might play for ten minutes or two hours. It was a wake as her husband and brother had just died. I flew to Detroit and I sat in front of her with about 150 people in a church, while she sang and read poetry, whilst crying, for three hours. It was her first gig in 15 years and afterwards I carried her guitar to the car and sat next to her and we talked. After that concert, I needed nothing more from Patti Smith. It had come the full circle of the apprentice sitting with his teacher. In fact, I did get more from her. She curated the Meltdown festival. She invited me to sing one night – it was a night of singing songs about lost children. I was the only man singing on that night. I sang with Tilda Swinton, Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses, Tori Amos, Sinéad O'Connor, Yoko Ono, Marianne Faithfull and Patti Smith. It was one of the most incredible musical nights of my life. I got to play with the great icons of the last 20 years – the women who have changed what it is like to be a woman in rock & roll on every level. It was a great honour and quite awe-inspiring. It completed the completion. No other album comes close to Horses. I became a singer three years later because of Horses. It is why I write songs that are naked and that wish to reach out and change people's lives, rather than any of the other million reasons people become singers."