"""If you want to pick a Dusty Springfield album, it is tricky because you are not going to get the benefit of having some of the singles. The greatest thing about Dusty Springfield was her run of singles, but pure greatest hits albums are easy to wear out and you end up wanting a little bit more. This record does it all for me. It's from that period where she was undeniably the best singer in pop music and that includes singers from the US too. There is a sound to this album that is rough pop and soul without it getting too purist. It was made by someone who was very serious about what she did and had a voice that I don't think has ever been bettered. There is a desperation in the way she sings that made her a fascinating person and a person with some depth. It's a great combination that seems to keep cropping up - where pop music is made by an interesting character. I sometimes get a little tired of forty-somethings cataloguing American music from the 60s. It always get a little predictable and the same names crop up, like Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. While you aren't ever going to get around that, in this case because it is Dusty Springfield singing those songs, there is an edge to them and something more interesting. I know it is a conceptual idea, but sometimes you want authenticity to be played with a bit. With Dusty being an intriguing, white, part-Irish woman who had completely reinvented herself in the middle of the Tin Pan Alley pop machine, she was able to put a weird slant on her music. She put another angle on songs that were already great and - put it this way - I prefer her versions to the originals."

"Thee Headcoats had a really big and important part in mine and Laurie’s sound when we first started. We really loved that rough, dirty, garagey sound and the singer Billy Childish was a massive inspiration to us, he’s a Kent boy as well. “When me and Laurie were starting the band my Dad sat us down and played us a load of records, I remember him getting a stack of records out and this was one of them. This song really shaped our sound early on, we were a two-piece and we’d found this weird set-up, kind of by mistake, where I was going to stand up and drum and Laurie was going to play guitar. My Dad went through his records and picked out two-piece bands and garage punk bands. Quite a lot of it was this sort of stuff, Billy Childish has had quite a few other bands and there was a band called The Husbands as well, there was a lot of them. “It was everything about “I’m Hurting”, the whole sound of it and the vocals. I love that his voice is so British but it’s not a London voice, it’s got a real Kent twang to it and we wanted to sound like that a bit. I really like it when people sing in their own accent, a lot of the time these days’ people are singing in American accents, so it’s really refreshing to hear someone shouting in a Kent, geezer voice. “’I’m Hurting’ was one of the ones that clicked and we just thought ‘this is amazing.’ That was six years ago and I’m very fortunate my old man was obsessively into music his whole life and I had a lot of that put into me. Without him I wouldn’t know a lot of this music that I know about now."

"I think the period from 1979 to 1982 was the best period for British pop music. And out of all that stuff it's 'Oliver's Army' that I've chosen. It gets more incredible the older I get and the more I understand about it. Visually, when it first came out, Elvis Costello was like a Halloween version of Buddy Holly. It's all distorted - his clothes were too big for him and his glasses were too big for him. He didn't look like a very nice guy - quite frightening - but singing this amazing song. Some songs will move your feet, emotions, and some will move your head - and this has got all of this, all together. I knew all the words. I'd write the words down in my exercise book at school, but I didn't understand any of it. But they're such good words you don't really have to. I love that first line: "Don't start me talking/ I could talk all night". It just brings up that image of youthful idealism - we can sit up all night talking. Before you get into drink, drugs and all that, you just sit up talking because you can. I love that. It could Paris in the late 60s, or London at the end of the century, or Greenwich Village. Musically, I just read about the piano part... Elvis didn't like the song at all and they were going to scrap it, so the piano player suggested, "Why don't we play something like ABBA?" I think it's 'Dancing Queen'. And then they put that on and that was it. But no one wanted to say yes at first as it wasn't a very cool thing to do."

"This is a movie about showbiz, musicals, death, Bob Fosse, his love life: it’s all over the map. I can’t tell you what it’s about, but I love it. It’s so sexy. The first ten minutes are a feat of editing and music. One of the great openings of a musical. “It’s showtime,” says Roy Scheider as Joe Gideon, a thinly veiled portrait of Fosse himself. Little echoes of Joel Grey singing “Willkommen” in Cabaret. Gideon is our master of ceremonies, warning us to get ready to see some blood, sweat, and tears. I love movie musicals about showbiz—The Band Wagon, A Star Is Born, Singin’ in the Rain—and this really fits in that genre, with the dark edge of The Bad and the Beautiful. That should have been a musical directed by Fosse! Fosse as a choreographer turned director reminds me of another director I love, Stanley Donen. Aside from dance and music, their movies have another thing in common: incredible editing. All That Jazz and Lenny both play around with time in a way the Donen film Two for the Road does. A lot has been written about Fosse and his love of Fellini films. All That Jazz does borrow from 8½, but this is not an homage. Fosse, inspired by Fellini, created something new. It’s a tragedy that Fosse didn’t live longer, because in his five films—Sweet Charity, Cabaret, Lenny, All That Jazz, and Star 80—I see what could have been one of the great filmmakers of all time. Imagine Bob Fosse directing Chicago! All That Jazz is the beginning of that journey. It’s as if all his gifts—the love of dance and the inspiration from Jerome Robbins and Jack Cole; the personal and profound collaboration with his partner, Gwen Verdon; and the man himself—were coming into focus."

"I'm reminded how great it is all the time. It's a weird record, it has passages that are just fucking weird bleeps out of a synthesiser. People dismiss it because it's so popular, and I would tell them if they heard pieces of it they would think it's some freaked out indie group with these great old synthesisers. It's just so well done. There are these strange, jazz elements to Pink Floyd that I think musicians notice. I don't think the audience cares - these neat little things they do that make it their own trip. These combinations of chords and notes that just aren't typical. I suppose to me, it's universal music. I think they do this reptilian brain version of universal, emotional music and they use these very simple build-ups and harmonies, and they nail it on that record 20 different times. And to know that they end on one of the great crescendos that they've ever done, that bit in 'Eclipse' where they sing "all that you touch, all that you feel"… the way that builds up, no-one is ever going to do it that perfectly again. Those simple words, those simple themes, building, building. And you've got to remember it's Roger Waters singing. He's not a great singer, but it highlights this thing - it's a motherfucker, you can't write a song that great. You just have to hope that something happens. For them to end on that [sings a spot on Waters impression] "the sun is eclipsed by the moon." Blammo! Then that heartbeat, it's fucking phenomenal. It's easy to dismiss it because it's so popular, but I would say to anyone they should secretly listen to it and then discover that 'oh my God, it's awesome'."