"If you want to think about Roxy Music as a real force, you have to really understand just how unusual it was for a band to be as self-referential in the early 70s. Pop music had never done that before. It wasn't taking references from the 50s and the 60s and pulling them apart, or taking high fashion and lampooning it, and being - in quotes - 'ironic'. We are so used to everybody grabbing their influences from 60 years of pop culture nowadays that it is no big deal. Back then, when Roxy Music first came out it was like trying to get your head around a human collage. I was a teenager and didn't really understand that nuance, but I knew that something was happening and that it was very clever. But, that all doesn't really mean very much unless the songs sound great and Roxy's records sounded really great. I am glad that bands had such a strong concept around the business of making singles and Roxy Music took it very seriously. It shows how great a single can be in that you can take all of that conceptual stuff and try and cram it into a three-and-a-half minute song. That is an amazing thing. That's why I picked the collection of singles. The Roxy albums are great in their own right, but when you have everything that was going on with Roxy Music in a collection of sharp singles, all next to each other on an album, I will go with that album every time. I try to make all my solo albums sound like greatest hits albums. Roxy Music managed to be slightly weird and not obvious, but really entertaining and intriguing and catchy at the same time. That is a very, very powerful combination."

"I had an English teacher in high school. You know how every high school has a super hip teacher? Mine was this guy named Leonard Krill. I had been a big fan of David Bowie, and I think Talking Heads had just put out Remain In Light, and of course I knew Brian Eno because he he worked with Bowie and produced Talking Heads and Roxy Music. My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts came out and I couldn't afford to buy it, but Leonard Krill loaned it to me so I could tape it. It was again one of those records that I didn't fully understand, because all the vocals come from these weird, disparate sources. I kind of thought because I was listening to a David Byrne and Brian Eno record I would hear David Byrne and Brian Eno's vocals, that it'd sound like one of the records they'd made. On the first listen I didn't quite get it, but after that it became one of my favourite records. In 1999 when I put out the album Play, I was doing some interviews and people were asking where did I get the idea of putting other people's old vocals onto rhythmic music, and I said 'it all started with My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Without that album I would never ever have had the idea to sample old vocals and put them on my tracks'. It was a direct inspiration - in a really simple way I was copying my heroes. I can't think of any person who has affected modern music more than Brian Eno. If you invented a fictional character like Brian Eno it'd be almost unbelievable."

"All right. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll pick something completely weird and ridiculous for the very reason that I just said, and that would be Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, specifically for the scene in which Jim Carrey births himself from the anus of a fake rhino, because it is one of the single most genius pieces of comedic writing that will never be given its due because it’s part of a ridiculous, vaguely racist, silly comedy. The setup for that whole sequence is incredible from the point you see him. He’s inside this rhino, which he’s using as a sort of eavesdropping device, and it’s so meticulously done. There’s a fan inside because it’s hot. The fan breaks, so he has to undress. All to get to this point where he literally squeezes his way out of the behind of this rhino in front of a family of tourists who just effectively see a rhino giving birth to a screaming, naked human being. The industry involved in setting that joke up, the way that it just creeps up on you, like you’ll think, “Oh, it’s funny because he’s inside a rhino. It’s funny because it’s hot. It’s funny because he’s taking off his underwear.” And then suddenly, you realize, “Oh, wait a minute, this was a long game they were playing here. This is a buildup.” And it snuck up on you. And suddenly he starts to, as only he can, emerge from the back of this rhino, and then this family pulls up, and it’s just brilliant. I think that sequence should be celebrated in no uncertain terms because it is just a genius piece of comedy executed with the extraordinary aplomb that that man is capable of displaying."

"""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."

"I think it’s probably one of the most inspirational movies for me because of Paul Newman‘s performance. I think that is, to me, some of the best, [most] controlled acting in a movie. I think that he has this incredible likability. Even though he’s a drunk, washed-up lawyer, you’re still rooting for him from the very beginning. I’m that sort of weird guy who will watch a movie almost every day if I can. It’s harder when you’re working on the show. I buy a lot of movies on used DVD so I can have certain scenes. I was really looking for things to inspire me. When I got out of college I was waiting tables professionally [and] couldn’t afford to go the theater [every] night. I think those great movies can actually make you feel a certain way. Not only emotionally, but if you’re in this business, it’s one of those things where you see someone do something that good and it buys you a year of energy. That’s what I was really looking for. It sounds so cliché,[but I wanted] to bask in the glow some of these amazing performances, like [those of] Dustin Hoffman and Marlon Brando. But it was also fun. To get back to what I was saying before, that 1970s raw energy, it’s almost frustrating now that people aren’t making more movies like that because people won’t go see them. Even Away We Go is, in a way, a tribute to the 1970s movies, too, but more of the Hal Ashby thing. Again, I don’t think people are making movies like this, so for Sam to do it is incredibly cool. And the fact that my name’s on the poster is totally surreal."

"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 was never that big a U2 fan actually! The others, especially Dominic [Scott] who left before we got a record deal, were massive fans. He was a great guitarist - I think Keane would be a really different animal had Dominic stayed with us, he’s a brilliant guitarist. He basically just played a bit like The Edge meets Jonny Greenwood. And the others would harp on about U2, I was a bit younger and I was still into the Beatles and Queen, but Achtung Baby, of all of their records, is my favourite. It’s quite exposed, I suppose. I think that The Edge was getting divorced when they wrote that record and a lot of the songs were trying to make sense of that mess. But my favourite U2 song is 'Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses' and it’s really weird because that has the best middle eight that has ever been written - it might even be like 32 bars long! It’s a total heart-stopping moment, it’s vintage U2, it drops down with Bono doing his posturing, rock star thing, and then it builds and builds and launches into that great chorus. It’s classic U2, all quite pretentious. One of my problems with U2 is that it can sometimes smack of bad school poetry from time to time! I remember someone saying to me, “Oh that line about playing Jesus to the lepers in your head was the greatest line every written in a pop song!”. That’s the fucking lamest line I’ve ever heard! We met Steve Lillywhite when we signed our record deal, he produced that song, and we were saying, "Tell us about 'Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses'", and he was like, “Oh, I’ve got nothing but bad memories about that song! We couldn’t ever get it to work!”"

"Following on nicely from “Just What I Needed”, I went to see my Dad in Florida and he had the 12” of “Stand and Deliver” which had “Beat My Guest” on the B-side. “I was into rap at that time, Run DMC and that kind of stuff, so for a ten-year-old it was ‘What the fuck is this?’ I was blown away. I was floored by the riff and “Beat My Guest” has the ultimate guitar riff, it’s so badass. I was into the make-up as well because I was into KISS too, so I thought that was cool. I was mesmerised by the whole look. “My Dad was always one step ahead of me. I remember being with him in Michigan once, we had this cottage we’d go to with my grandparents and he joined us one year, which was really fun. He was looking in the paper to see who was playing in Detroit - which was two hours away - he found out The Dead Kennedys were playing in some tiny little club and he left to go and see them. “I remember thinking my Dad was the coolest, I was ‘What the hell does that mean? He’s into some weird shit.’ He taught me everything. He spoke to me about music, but he doesn’t play music. I acquired a lot of his records when my parents split up, he gave me that Adam Ant record and I was bawling on the plane. “The next time I went to visit my Dad I’d discovered more Adam and The Ants and I wanted to talk to him about all of these other songs I’d heard, but he was already onto the next thing, which was Devo."

"I’ve known this song for about ten years from when I picked up the compilation album Disco Not Disco on tour, I found it on vinyl and I just liked the cover. This song’s from the end of the ‘70s, its New York, disco-punk and that’s my other thing, like ESG and those sort of bands, it’s the sort of song you’d hear in a weird dark New York club in the late ‘70s. “Like with a lot of these songs it’s got a groove, but it’s a slightly off the beaten track sort of groove, there’s a dirty bassline running along and a cool beat that makes it. There’s a vibe about it and it gets me going, you can put it on just before you go out, or like the Beefheart track I’ll put it on if I’m having a party. “I don’t really do dance music or funk but that doesn’t mean that stylistically I can’t attach myself to elements of them, it’s just a case of finding inspiration in anything, even if it’s not my school. There’s no reason why I can’t hear a song by Kendrick Lamar or Kanye West or whoever and hear an element of it and think ‘Fuck, that’s great’ and relate to it. It’s similar with this song, it’s like ‘Wow, that’s not what I expected’ but I’m hearing other things in it that I find inspiring from the point of view of being in a studio and creating a piece of music. It’s like ‘Copenhagen’ by Scott Walker and hearing an element of that or the percussive element of Kazino, there’s no reason why those two can’t marry together."

"I think these albums [by Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke] essentially let me know what I was supposed to do in life. I would read Jaco's autobiography, I wanted to learn everything about the man, and I would go find the other albums that he worked on. Everybody knows him as the actual virtuoso bassist that planted the seed, but I wanted to know what made him tick, what got him to the point of being who he was. That's what Jaco Pastorius did to me; it made me want to know him as a person. I would study, I would transcribe, I'd listen, imitate and mimic everything. As you go through different phases, somebody may even go so far as to say 'you sound like this person'. I mean, you gotta be okay with those moments, because it's leading to something. If you're keen on the instrument, it's always leading to something else. Every time I listen to the self-titled album I feel weightless. I feel like it's going between 10-year-old me and 35-year-old me. It almost feels like I've never heard it before, and I get the same emotions every time I hear it. It's one of the only ways I know I'm moving forward is by hearing this album all the time. It's crazy, it feels weird, but it's the truth. It's like a reset button in my life, listening to this album. By the time I get to the end of Jaco's album, I just remember how much and how hard guys like him used to work. It also reminds me to keep going, and it also reminds me where I came from."