"Tonto's Expanding Head Band were very early synth adopters. Tonto was an acronym for The Original New Timbral Orchestra which was a reference to what they worked on: the biggest polyphonic analogue synth in the world. Tonto was almost like a cockpit of synths arranged in a horseshoe shape. When they played it, they were inside the machine. Zero Time was hugely influential, most notably on Stevie Wonder who heard it, freaked out and asked them to produce his records. They ended up doing Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness' First Finale. They also did a load of Isley Brothers records, including 3 + 3. Zero Time borders on New Age in a way. I'd never really heard music like this before – totally instrumental, the whole record composed on synths. I saw them live when they played at the Big Chill festival in 2006. I hadn't known they were playing [a line-up consisting of the band's Malcolm Cecil and his son, DJ Moonpup, with a portable version of Tonto performed]. It was amazing, even if it was a bit odd because they interspersed songs with educational stuff, little bits of interviews with Stevie Wonder and other people they'd worked with. It worked though – what a show!"

"Vince Vaughn made me laugh like all the way through this film. There’s plenty of dialogue, but the part where he’s sitting at the dinner table and he’s getting the rub-and-tug under table is just… He’s doing everything with his face, like, he’s not really saying anything. What’s coming out of him is awesome, pardon the pun. Will Ferrell is great too, but just watch Vince Vaughn in that entire movie where he gets strapped down to the bed and they want to play tummy sticks and stuff. “No, no tummy sticks.” The scene where he goes into the kitchen and he’s angry, and he’s like “We’re not talking,” but he’s loading up on carbs and stuff and announces he’s going to “sit over here,” dumping syrup on top of everything. It’s slapsticky and over the top, but there’s room on everyone’s queue for something big that has celebrities in it but a great score, and it looked great, they’re taking the boat out, there’s big weddings. It’s a big movie, but it didn’t feel big and overpowering; it felt intimate. There was a direction, there was a sense, and they went. And they didn’t deviate, and it also has such a sweetness and lessons learned and all that kind of stuff."

"You know what, I think I’m going to swerve The Godfather and go for The King of Comedy. I love Scorsese – I loved Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Mean Streets — they were all really seminal, but I always like a film which is, if not leftfield it’s not obvious Scorsese. He has made less obvious films, like New York, New York or The Last Waltz, which don’t hit the mark for me, but King of Comedy is a gem I think. Curiously enough I was talking about it to my fiancé at the weekend, saying, ‘You’ve got to see it,’ because I think it’s where we are now as a contemporary celebrity-seeking society. There are Rupert Pupkins everywhere now. What they don’t have, that Rupert Pupkin had, is innocence and naivety. When you see the whole Big Brother world, the way that people are cloying to get famous now, that’s Rupert Pupkin. I remember when I first watched The Office I saw a lot of Rupert Pupkin in David Brent. Rupert Pupkin had such likeability whereas Brent is a toad – you want to watch him fail. With Pupkin you want to say, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t go to Jerry Lewis‘ house. Don’t tell Diahnne Abbott you know him — you don’t!'"

"I got into Roachee through the Sith Lord tune with the Prodigy backing and then I started to try and find other stuff but it's hard because he's not really done a lot. He did a bit of time in prison and then came out, so I don't know what his relationship is like with people like Wiley and that, but he seems to be quite an underdog. He's not done anything for a while I don't think. I like the crapness of what he does, when he's like, ""Yeah, I make a pass at your missus, I don't care,"" it doesn't even rhyme. ""I bring animals round your manor,"" all that. It's just not very good some of it, but that's what appeals. Trim is like that too, he trails off a bit, when he's talking about the solar system. It's like, what the fuck is that? That appealed to me as well as the beats. The 'Bad Boy' tune is a classic to be honest, I might be shot down for that. 'Dirty Danger' is on there as well. This album came out in 2012. Grime wasn't really being noticed around that sort of time, it had fallen out of favour. It had come up with Wiley and disappeared really fast."

"Led Zeppelin, goddamn! I don't think they made a bad record! There's that classic line from Cameron Crowe's movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High where they're cruising around, talking about how to get chicks. And the guy says: ""If you wanna score with a chick, turn out side two of volume four!"" I've used that a few times actually. It works [laughs]! Anyway if it didn't work, it was a nice soundtrack while it was going down. Jimmy Page is another guitar player that means a lot to me. Every member of that fucking band: John Paul Jones was an amazing writer, arranger and producer, as well as Jimmy. Plus John Bonham and Robert Plant... that's one of the greatest rock & roll bands of all times. It's just straight-up, fucking sexy, kick ass and shit, man! All the way from dirty low-down rock & roll to the biggest orchestral tracks like ‘Kashmir’. They travelled a lot of ground while keeping their roots intact, the blues. You know, certain bands really resonate in certain areas and that was one band that was always popular up there where I come from, the Northwest. You have at least ten fucking Zeppelin songs that you can jam with anybody at any time."

"Metallica is a beast that is still living and breathing strong. They continue to set the bar, man. Nobody's fucking bigger or better in my opinion. I know all those guys and became good friends with them. That record is where I got in. The track that got me in was ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’. I've been able to play that with those guys on a handful of occasions. It's one of the coolest things in the world to fucking be able to do that. Except for a few, I played with all these bands. I got my bass player from Ozzy, my guitars from Eddy. They become kind of friends and peers. That's pretty cool. I still get a little geeky as a fan around those guys. I got to keep myself in check as it's like: ""Fuck, man!"". I don't think you ever lose touch with being a music fan, ‘cause that's more than half the reason you probably did it anyway. You are trying to make music like they did, and maybe some kid down the line will be talking about your record the same way, and may be you will turn him on to be able to make his own music."

"People kept saying that Odessey and Oracle was a forgotten classic and that The Zombies never got the attention they deserve, that’s when I checked them out and this song really stood out to me. It’s just on the right side of being over the top, because he’s picked this unsettling line - 'My hands won’t stop shaking,' - and he’s just repeating it again and again and the repetition alone is so powerful. “It’s not judging, it’s not saying what was so terrible, just that his hands won’t stop shaking. The more times you hear that the more you think, 'Why? What the hell’s going on?' I think that’s much more powerful than some big description about what happened, or even how he’s feeling about it. “It’s definitely something I’ve used lots of times in our songs, repeating something that might not seem that big, but once you’ve heard it a few times it starts to play with your mind a bit. Meaning becomes doubled and tripled and you begin to wonder why they’re repeating it. It’s a weird thing to do, repeating yourself; if you’re talking to someone, it’s kind of insane. I like the insanity that comes across in that."