"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!"

"I adore this song, my wife and I played it at our wedding and it’s a ringtone on my phone. Every now and then you hear something and think ‘I wish I could write a song like that, something that gets to the essence of what it means to be alive.’ I remember the first time I heard ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ on the radio and I was like ‘Damn, I wish I’d written that song.’ The strings work so well with Richard Ashcroft’s singing and lyrics, which sum up a lot of the complicated feelings you have as an individual trying to get through each day. It’s a perfect wedding of the two of them. It’s wrapped around this glorious production and the sound of the band is really minimal, it’s mainly the string arrangement, which of course was from The Rolling Stones. If they’d just cleared it ahead of time they probably would have done a 50/50 deal on the publishing, but they didn’t, it was too late and they didn’t have any control. The Rolling Stones didn’t need the royalties as badly! I also admire ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ from a producer’s standpoint because I love its simplicity. The drums are the same pattern over and over, I think it’s a drum-loop, for the bass it sounds like they got a two or four bar loop, because the chords don’t change, and the guitar overdubs are all textural, it’s just these blips, bleeps and little echoes flowing through the mix. It’s a brilliant soundscape, it doesn’t really sound like a rock song, where you have blazing, loud distorted guitar amps, it’s got this atmospheric vibe to it and I think that fits the lyrics and the singing perfectly."

"I’m a huge Oasis fan. I saw Supersonic a couple of months ago and I loved it. I like seeing Liam and Noel interact when they talk to each other because they’re clearly brothers, they go at each other and they’re funny, some of what they say is really articulate, some of it is completely at loggerheads. I remember I was in Los Angeles, heading to the studio listening to the K-Rock radio station and they said “Here’s the new song by a British band called Oasis” and ‘Live Forever’ came on and I just loved it, I turned it up really loud in the car. It’s the guitar riff and the sentiment behind the lyrics, but the second I heard Liam singing he was just going for it. He’s got one of the greatest rock voices there is, there’s a kind of sneer almost in the way he sings, it’s all attitude. Live Forever’ was my first impression of Oasis and it’s the template for what makes Oasis sound like Oasis. I love the tone and Noel’s guitar and I like the chord progression, but to me what makes Oasis Oasis is Liam’s singing. The songs that Noel sang are lovely, but he doesn’t have that same bravado that Liam has. It was a combination of the two of them, but it definitely needed Liam’s vocals out front and centre for the kind of attitude and swagger that he would bring to the song. Again, when I heard it I was ‘damn, I wish I’d written that song.’ It’s got a killer guitar riff and the chord progression is good. It’s dead simple and like most Oasis songs they’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, in fact usually Noel would admit he was just trying to write a good Beatles rip-off song!"