"He's known in the indie rock subculture as the other half of a band called The Folk Implosion that he was in with Lou Barlow from Sebadoh. They did most of the songs on the Kids soundtrack and their song 'Natural One' was a single in the 90s. John was also a member of the Palace Brothers which was Will Oldham's band from before he became Bonnie "Prince" Billy. So he has a little bit of history collaborating with other great people, but he also made a series of lo-fi home recorded records in the 90s. It is a strange, outsidery folk record. It's psychedelic and a little reminiscent of things like Syd Barrett and Skip Spence's Oar, but it also has this really interesting British folk, Incredible String Band type of 12 string guitar playing. The lyrics are very free associating, somewhat improvised, very intimate and very quiet. His records are so intimate that he broke down a wall between himself and the tape recorded that had never been broken down before. It makes you feel like you're in this tiny little space with him and his singing you this craziest record. I discovered this album at Kim's Underground, a record store in New York. I just bought one of his cassettes off a rack because it looked interesting to me. I'm really lucky I grabbed that tape because Leave Home was the most listen to record of my early teenage years. The style was so inspiring to me growing-up, that all I wanted to do was make John Davis-like songs. A lot of the early Moldy Peaches songs like 'Lucky No.9', 'Lazy Confessions' – all these things on the first album – are me trying to copy John Davis' stuff."

"I grew up in a house with two older brothers, and my parents played music a lot. I remember that Prince just used to be on in the car. Parade is one that I remember from a young age more than the others. I remember bringing a tape of Purple Rain into school and playing 'When Doves Cry' and people dancing to that. I remember all of those records in a bit of a blur. I remember being in the playground at school, and singing to myself the song 'Under The Cherry Moon' from that album, and also 'New Position'. Lyrics would just come into my head because I heard them so much at home. Parade is just the one of all of them that I believe is the least dated to the time that it was made. It feels quite adventurous musically. I always thought it was Prince and the band, but actually, the first four songs he just sat down and made in one continuous go. He played the drum parts for the first four tracks in sequence, and then overdubbed the rest of the instruments. It's a really amazing sequence. The rhythms are changing and the tracks speed up and slow down, but it has this great live feel to it. It's really unusual instrumentation for what is essentially a funk record - it's got double bass, it's got strings and orchestrations There are some very short, odd songs, but they're these real bursts of energy. His lyrics are really playful on 'New Position', but then it goes to something more melodramatic on 'Under The Cherry Moon', then there's 'Girls & Boys' which is one of the biggest tunes on the record outside of 'Kiss'. It doesn't feel like a very mainstream or chart-orientated record. It feels like a very eccentric record that only Prince could have made."

"To Bring You My Love is my favorite PJ Harvey record, I was definitely obsessed with her at that point. She was doing something with the blues that not a lot of artists that I was interested in were doing, sort of making it contemporary. That record had a very natural sound, but it also had a real style to it. It was produced. I still reference To Bring You My Love when we make records. I had really come around to Wire and Talking Heads around this time too, and I started to like that kind of abstract lyrical imagery more than literal story telling. It made it easier to write lyrics, because it was easier to hide behind. At that point, when I was writing lyrics it was all about: What can I sing that won’t embarrass me standing up there onstage? And if you could latch onto something that had a cool meaning to it, that was a bonus. But it wasn’t the primary concern. Sometimes that can lead to a lot of really bad lyrics. And a lot of it is about taste: I didn’t know a lot about what Stephen Malkmus was singing about, but it fucking worked. This is when Spoon’s first album, Telephono, came out, on Matador. In the early ’90s I started noticing that a lot of the records I liked had this Matador logo on the back: Guided by Voices, Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Liz Phair. They were the coolest label. To be able to be in the same company as those people was unreal. So, for a brief time, it was amazing—and then the record came out and nobody cared."

"What killer pop songs, just killer fucking pop songs. It’s all over the place and I remember looking at it as a kid, just looking at the cover, it’s like a cartoon and at third grade I would play that record again and again. 'Lovely Rita' is probably my favourite song. I remember I had a crush on this girl and at that age you don’t know what girls are about and this song had something to do with my crush on this girl. I don’t know how, but it did, so it brings back memories of a more innocent time in my life for sure. It’s so ingenious and a pure band effort where all the band were listening to each other. I know from reading about that record later that there were a lot of battles but I think the band were at its zenith in terms of allowing each other’s input. Guns was also a band where everybody respected everybody else’s musical opinion - Appetite was a record that was a serious group effort. We didn’t have any away to record ourselves, we didn’t even have a PA, Axl would be singing lyrics into one of our ears while we were playing really loudly in this little room, so the only time we got to hear these songs properly was when we played live –in front of three people sometimes - 'cos there were monitors on stage. Then you’d realise that songs like 'Rocket Queen' were way too long and be shaving them. By Illusion we had a big rehearsal place with a PA and could record ourselves on cassette and hear what we were doing. And we had time, and if you don’t let time get away from you time can be a really great thing if you know how to manage it."

"Then I would say the next time I remember going and seeing a movie and having my mind f—ing blown was A Clockwork Orange. I was probably about 15 or so when I saw that. At that point in time there were no DVDs, there was no VHS. As a movie fanatic, I could only look at pictures and go, “Oh my god, A Clockwork Orange! I have to see this movie!” But how do you see it? It’s not playing anywhere. Eventually it was playing at a college, and I went to go see it at this college. I was only fifteen years old and it was all college people and they seemed real cool. And it just f—ing blew my mind. And ever since then I’ve been fanatic for Kubrick and Malcolm McDowell. That’s why I love working with Malcolm, because he loves talking about that stuff. You can ask him anything, and he’ll give you all the dirt on how… What is amazing for me too, hearing the stories about the movie, is just how much time they had. Now you have, “Oh, you have an hour to shoot that thing.” And he’ll go, “Oh, we shot that in five days.” That Singing in the Rain scene. They didn’t even figure out the song until eventually he said that Kubrick was like, “Do you know any songs?” And when Stanley would be at a loss for what to do, he would go up to Malcolm and go, “You’re probably going to be sick tomorrow. You won’t be able to make it to work for probably about a week.” And they would shut down and Malcolm would pretend to be sick so Stanley could figure out what he was going to shoot next."

"Another movie that takes place in the Edwardian era, but in the country where Edward was actually reigning. It was an important movie for me as a kid and it continued to be something that I revisited again because it’s just good. Good storytelling, quite beautiful. You’ve got to love the matte paintings of the London rooftops. You’ve got to love a movie where a witch is your nanny. Obviously, no challenge to Dick van Dyke’s Australian Cockney accent, but his performance in that movie is really incredible. He is such a good physical comedian and when they’re in the chalk painting — which is also just lovely, the live action mix and the animation — he often has the same dance choreography as Julie Andrews. And he interprets it incredibly differently. It’s not that he can’t do them, it’s that he’s interpreting them in a different way, for humor, with his body type and so cleverly. It’s a movie where kids have power. They understand some things that their Edwardian dad doesn’t. And we use a Mary Poppins-esque weathervane shot in The Lighthouse. And then also, as much as it is a very, very satisfying narrative, the movie’s not without mystery. What is Mary Poppins’ backstory? What is her relationship with Bert? She creeps me out. Like when her reflection in the mirror keeps singing after her. The way she’s a little bit austere with the children and then the next minute she’s super cuddly, it is a little creepy. And then it just isn’t her, but when the kids get lost in East London, and there’s the dogs barking, and the old beggar woman who’s like, “Come here, children” or whatever. That was incredibly terrifying as a child."

"Sam Cooke’s voice on this song is just absolutely... It guts you, it's so emotional. It was written around the time of the civil rights movement, really addressing the struggle and trying to maintain hope throughout that struggle and to push through and to persevere. “""A Change Is Gonna Come"" is something that I sang years ago in this thing called The Zodiac Show in L.A. It was the first time that I was stepping out of the world of musical theatre, singing how I wanted to sing and dressing how I wanted to dress and expressing myself. “The song took on a slightly new meaning for me because I’d been struggling within the theatre world, believe it or not, for sort of being perceived as 'too gay' for a lot of these roles and the things that I was auditioning for. It became a bit frustrating and I thought “Well, fuck, I thought I was in theatre, all the weirdos are in theatre and we're supposed to support each other.” I didn't feel that sense of community as much as I wanted to. “I also ended up signing it on American Idol and it kind of came back around as a full circle thing. Funnily enough, I sang it in the finale and didn't win. Many would say “Oh, maybe that's because of how they perceived you to be.” It was this repeated concept for me, both times. “My interpretation of the song was my personal change, that things were going to get better and things were going to become different hopefully, and that I was going to not give up, and strive towards that. This song has that personal meaning to me."

"I think the idea is happening upon something without any clue as to what context it comes from. That has been the important thing to me. What do they think about this? Is this pop music to them? Is it religious? One very good example for me was I was in Ibiza listening to North African radio stations and this Arabic song came on and I thought: ""Fuck, I've never heard anything like that."" I had a cassette recorder in this little ghetto blaster so I managed to record a little bit of it, but I couldn't figure out what the name of the artist was or anything, so again I just used to walk into record shops where they sold Arabic records and I would sing this song, but I never found it like that. Then I was in Egypt about 12 years later and I was in a market, and there was a guy selling loads of cassettes so I sang this song to him, and in the meantime I'd changed all of the lyrics, which were in Arabic, into English. In fact, the lyrics I've since found out are ""hebeena, hebeena"", but I was singing it as ""heaviness, heaviness"". So I sung this whole song in English to him with this Arabic melody and he was cracking up. He called all his mates over from the other local stalls and was getting me to do it again. So I sang it again and then asked him, ""What is this song?"" and he said that it was Farid El Atrache. He picked out this cassette and that was the song, I'd finally found it. So to have that experience is almost impossible now."

"This is a go-to tune for me whenever I'm doing any of my TS5 shows. I remember when I was playing out the original in the early ‘90s, but I prefer the remix of it, where the beat is a little tougher. “Show Me Love” is always guaranteed to go down. Anywhere I go, as soon as people hear the opening chords, they're like ‘That's a tune I can make memories to.' “And her voice! I got to meet her at Ibiza Rocks, where I do a pool party residency. I played the song in my set and I looked up on the balcony where she was standing, and it was this moment - I'm playing the song, Robyn S is up there mouthing the words to me. I'm thinking, “Should I jump off the stage and get a mic to her? Should someone get a memo to her to come down?” And she's sending me love heart signs from where she's standing. It's Robyn S! And I'm playing one of the most iconic dance tracks of all time. “Why does it resonate with people? Well, for one, the vocal range she's hitting grabs you from the start, like that long “Ohh” she hits at the top. It's also a very simple synth line, which it has in common with “Nightcrawler” too, and it has a simple chord progression. Everyone was trying to copy that kind of pattern, but her line just nailed it. “And lastly it's what she's trying to say, ‘Show me love’. Instantly you feel this euphoria, you feel uplifted. And it's kind of angsty the 'show me love' she's singing, like ‘you gotta show me love and pass all the nonsense’. But if you don't know the context of the story and you've just got your hands in the air, it’s like “ahhh”, you feel it"

"Say what you will, nobody is trying to show off here, it's just solid songwriting. The great thing about almost every song on that record is that you can pick up an acoustic guitar and just play it and sing along. Joe [Elliott] singing the melody, he doesn't sing the highest and his voice doesn't rip up the most, it just sticks to the melody. It's great rock sensibility. The melodies aren't too bluesy, it's just a really solid record, and ten million other people must have thought so too because they bought it. But the interesting thing for me about that record is how honest it sounds, yet how unlike rock bands it was recorded. We took Def Leppard out with us and they told us the story of how their producer Mutt Lange would get them in the studio and the record was totally fabrication, by that I mean they would put down the drum track, then the computers would move the drum track so it really felt in time. Then he would ask Phil or someone to play one note - so instead of chords they'd be doing one note at a time. Then the chords would come from different tracks so you could control it, one note at a time. That record took two years. I've never heard of anybody doing that before or since. You can argue that it makes it sound different or better, but then there are great punk bands that go and bang things out in a day. There are no rules! Led Zeppelin I was recorded in 18 hours. The Beatles' first two records were done in 24 hours. But you can't argue with Mutt Lange's success."