"This goes back a long time for me. This was a real defining record for Supergrass around '95 when we were first starting out. It was on the tour bus all the time and I remember our tour manager at the time really loving it. He'd wake us up every morning knocking on our door going, 'baby's on fire!', doing this mad Eno impression and that would always lift us up and make us laugh. There were so many lyrics that we'd sing at each other. I'd meet Danny and go, 'Cindy tells me…' It had this really long lasting effect on us. It's brilliant, just brilliant. It's Eno being kind of clever but dumb, sophisticated but raw and I think it's brilliant. I love his voice and the double-tracking on it and I think it ended up being quite an iconic sound. It's very unique. And for all of his technical ability, I love that he plays dumb on some of these tracks, you know, like on 'Needles In The Camel's Eye' and the guitars are big, filthy, dirty and horrible things. I love it. We almost did work with Brian Eno. We had a meeting with him in Paris before Diamond Hoo Ha and I can't remember exactly what happened but I think our timing schedules didn't work out. It was something frustrating that meant we couldn't work with him. It's weird one. It's kind of like, are they different Brian Enos? Is it a danger to confuse the Here Come The Warm Jets Brian Eno thinking that he was going to walk into a studio with us and create something that gives you that feeling because he's a different person now. I think he's amazing and he's proved to be still a musical force. An incredible guy and he was a really lovely chap when we met him."

"This is weird. I only came across them because one of our neighbour's kids had a band and I used to go around and help them out by plugging things back in properly or they'd come round to mine and I would do them a demo. But they used to play me records and I used to ask 'what is that?' - one of these bands were Biffy Clyro. They didn't really register with me because they were a bit too intricate but I was driving home one night, coming up Kingston Hill and this record came on and I had to pull over to the side of the road as I was shedding tears. And the song was 'Many Of Horror'. And I thought 'this is the best thing I've heard in quite a while' but I didn't know it was Biffy Clyro! I just went 'ooh!'. I went home, bought it on iTunes and played the song about 25 to 30 times, crying my eyes out. Something in that song flipped me out completely. It's quite an anthemic, emotional song. I decided I needed to email the guy who produced the record and I just said 'I've just heard the song and it's completely and utterly blown me away'. He mailed back and said 'thanks very much for that, really appreciate it'. I've never done that before or since! But fuck me, music can still do that [to you]. When I listened to the rest of the album, I was like 'what the hell is going on?'. It takes some energy to get into it because it's fierce – there's some odd shit going on. I'm yet to see them live. They played Reading or whatever and I recorded it off the television and I've watched it on my own full tilt, having had a couple of beers or glass of wine. Just amazing!"

"I always say that T. Rex were my band when I was a kid. What I mean by that is so much of my identity was about being a T. Rex fan. A bit like choosing your colours as to which football team you would support, when I was nine or ten I found T. Rex. I was obsessed with Bolan. At that point, coincidentally, they were about to hit their stride as a commercial and artistic force. They had released Electric Warrior and they were on the precipice of being the most important band around. The Slider came out and it had 'Metal Guru' on it. It was a song that changed my life as I had never heard anything so beautiful and so strange, but yet so catchy. 'Telegram Sam' was also on that album and the whole thing was unusually spooky and had a weird atmosphere, considering it was a number one record and they were essentially a teenybop band. It's another one of those records that what you get on the cover is what you get inside. I was a teenybopper at the time. I was ten, eleven, buying lots of records and loving the pop music I heard on the radio. I consider myself very lucky that what was on the radio at the time and the music being made for very young children happened to have some substance to it. T. Rex was pure pop, but it was coming from someone who had had a go at being a hippy and being a mod. The album was very much of its time, and had a sexuality to it that I didn't understand at that age. There is an aspect of the sound that Tony Visconti must have had a large part in, and Flo [Mark Volman] and Eddie [Howard Kaylan] from The Turtles on backing vocals added this odd, druggy spook to the whole thing."

"This was probably the first Scott Walker song that I heard, other than Walker Brothers’ songs. “I was in a friend’s car in London around eight years ago and ‘It’s Raining Today’ came on. At the beginning I thought it was unnerving, this weird cluster of notes. At the end of it I turned to my friend and asked, “What was that? Is it modern?” When he explained it was a record from the ‘60s I was like “Are you kidding me?” The production and vocal sound is so clear and hi-fidelity. “I fell in love with the sound of it from a production point of view first of all. I’ve always been interested in the crooner vocal and all that sort of stuff, but once I got into the songwriting it blew my mind, because this is stuff that you can’t sit down and play on an acoustic guitar. “There’s this theory that you should be able to sit and play any good song on an acoustic guitar and ‘It’s Raining Today’ throws that theory out the window. You couldn’t do that song, and songs like it, justice on a guitar, because the orchestration and the chord changes are more psychedelic than any psychedelic record I know. I literally can’t work out any of the chord progressions, and I’m usually decent at sussing them out. I still don’t know what these extended chords are. Maybe if I was a piano player, I would. So, I find that very, very inspiring. “I absolutely love the string arrangement to the song too, it’s so harmonious, even though it’s totally inharmonic. I don’t know how to do that. It’s so brave to have that ominous thing going on underneath these beautiful cadences. There are moments where it’s just on the cusp, but because it’s an orchestra playing it they’re all moving together. If you did the same thing with electronic music or all of it separately, it would be very hard to get that movement and that swell and modulation."

"It's such a tune! That's the main reason it's on this list, I want everyone to listen to it more. I love the vocal delivery – that crooning is my favourite – that really smooth, male, cheesy-sounding vocal: I love it. “I love the sentiment. I don't know exactly what it's about but I'm guessing it's about when you meet someone for the first time and you screw it up and you gotta start again. Or you meet someone and you're too awkward to be cool and you're like ""fuck! I just wish I could meet you all over again and be a cool, normal person.” I love the lyrics ""When I next saw you, my heart reached out for you! My hands stuck like glue to my sides."" It sounds like the feeling you have in a dream where you can't run. It's another one we listen to in the van all the time. It's just such a banger. “We always wanted to do a cover of it but we haven't quite got round to it yet. I really enjoy covers. It's really fun to take someone else's song and rip it up, pull it apart and add new music into it, whole new parts, or take lyrics out and put new lyrics in and just fuck it up. I love playing covers live and surprising people with them, because we can see it in their faces: they know we're playing something they know, but they can't work out where they know it from, because we're playing it so differently. “At the moment we're covering Bonnie Tyler's “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and it's just so bombastic: I didn't wanna totally change it. We used to play a cover of Madonna's “Beautiful Stranger” and that one was really different from the original. If we did ‘Rip It Up’ I'd definitely sing it in that crooning voice, because I love it so much. I'd get Celia to try and play that weird bubbly bass line with some cool pedal."

"Now the heaviness comes! It's up there with Sehnsucht by Rammstein: just pure molten lava, classic metal. Alice In Chains were such a weird band: losing their singer, when he had gangrene and was addicted, and they went and did a record with fucking Elton John… just a truly bizarre band! Jerry Cantrell was the guitarist, and Layne Staley was the singer who sadly passed away. If you look at old footage of Layne Staley, he really was one of the most doom-laden, foreboding metal presences you could ever wish to see. Look at old footage of him and he'll just stand there, stock still, with his glasses on and he always had his arms covered because there was always something bad going on with him, but his voice just came out of him like the eternal cracking of the oldest oak in the mythical forest. His voice was just wipeout, it was so low and had so much meaning. And Jerry Cantrell was such a pointed, furious, lumpen but spry guitarist, and there hasn't been a classic metal album for a long time I think. This is a bit of a shit muso point, but I think a lot of that is down to modern day metal musicians tuning down. They do this drop, this detuning where everything is just 'du-doom du-doom du-doom'. That's why you don't get this kind of music anymore, because all the guitars are tuned too low. But Jerry Cantrell obviously has a classicist's mind when it comes to metal, and the song 'Them Bones'... it's a simple rudimentary chord, but as soon as it comes on there's a spectral, dying scream in the background, four chords going up in semitones, and it's just like, "Fuck me… how do people find this erudition out of simplicity?" That's when rock & roll is at its best, when it finds that complexity in simplicity, and power in loss or whatever you want to call it."

"I hadn't actually heard this song one before we played Carnegie Hall last year [for The Music of David Bowie concert featuring the Pixies, Debbie Harry, Cyndi Lauper and Michael Stipe]. We were the house band and had quite a few artists coming on to play, so I had to learn it. For me, it wasn't an obvious one. When I first heard it, I even thought it was a terrible song! Like it wasn't even a song! That was just my first impression of it. But it was only when I started playing it, and trying to do my own version of it, that I realised that it all fit perfectly. It was great to play live. It was just him throwing something together - it's unserious, a totally unpretentious concept, and the music just fits the lyrics so perfectly. You know, the drums are not that tight, and there are drum rolls where you think: 'Wow, that's like a beginner that's just been playing drums for six months!' But then you play it and it actually fits! It's really weird. It fits the idea of always crashing in the same car. If it had been played technically correctly it wouldn't have worked. For me, it was a good example of how everything in the backing of a song has to line up with the message of a song. I think a lot of music these days, gets into this over-produced, too-tight, no feel thing, but you can't fault it. It's correct. The dots are all in the right place, but there is no soul. Or even, there isn't a message to grab a hold of and it all falls down. It's so easy now to put something together in your bedroom on your computer that sounds like a finished record, but if you don't have those same elements there that make a good song, you may as well not bother!"

"Maybe ten years later [after seeing Salò], I had written some shorts and I was talking with a friend who said, “Oh, have you seen this Austrian movie that has been banned in France for extreme violence?” That came out in VHS. And the German title was Angst. And the VHS was called Schizophrenia — the French VHS with French subtitles. And I tell you it was weird, it was like the beginning of some kind of new thing — that some movies could be banned for theatrical release but they could still come out on VHS. So I got the VHS. Nowadays there are maybe things that are banned out there, but you can find it with one click on the net. But this time, something that was banned could be found on VHS. I bought that VHS; that was quite hard to find. And I believe that I watched that movie 50 times because each time a friend said, “Let’s go see a movie,” I said, “Come to my house. I’ll show you Schizophrenia.” So one by one I was showing that movie to all my friends. And it’s got the most amazing camera work in the history of cinema. Not so many movies that really impress when it comes to the camera work. Maybe Brian DePalma’s movies… or 2001. Or, for example, lately, the images of Gravity. But the camera work of this movie is so real. It added to a very violent story of the guy coming out of jail and killing a whole family in order to go back to jail where he felt better, and it’s based on a true story. And it’s got a [unique] voiceover. But the mix of that cruelty, the voiceover and the camera put in positions that you’ve never seen before made me be obsessed with the movie. Now, since three or four months ago, it’s for sale [on DVD here in America]. So if anybody is interested you can go on Amazon.com and buy that movie called Angst."

"It's one of the classic records of all time, but I remember when this came out I wasn't particularly a Stevie Wonder fan. He'd done the singles and he was a Tamla pop artist really, wearing a suit, and I thought I'd got him labelled. But then this record came out and it was like his coming of age almost. It's like a small journey, listening to this album. It has a very positive beginning and ending, from side one right through to the last track. And that whole thing of here I am in New York, that wonderful idea of bringing in sound effects of street sounds that gave a different atmosphere and set the scene for what you're about to hear. I think most bands wanted to do that kind of thing but it was very easy for it to take over, so it was mostly left to the Pink Floyds of this world. But for somebody to do it just on the one track worked really well. And he played drums on this album, too. That was the weird thing, because when you listen to the drums it doesn't sound like a drummer. The things he plays aren't instinctive, so there's a different kind of musicality to what he's doing, and where it goes and where he puts things and where he hits the toms and where he does crashes and stuff like that. In some ways it was very brave of him, because let's face it he could've got any drummer to do it. But it gives it what I suppose these days you'd call an artisan quality, but I think of it as an earthy feel. Otherwise everything would be too perfect on this record. You have to have imperfection to give it character and personality. I think there's something about imperfection that puts you more in touch with what you're listening to, because you're not alienated by something that's unachievable. This record has that by the sack full"

"I had this back in the days when The Monkees were a TV show and they were everybody's favourite. Every Saturday you'd rush home to watch them. Bear in mind that television then was three channels, and so pop music in any sense was really limited. There was Ready Steady Go on a Friday, Top Of The Pops had started, but you didn't get a lot. You didn't get a lot of kids with guitars, especially with long hair and flared trousers that were glamorously American. But the real thing came when the tunes that they had were so good. Every week you watched the show and every week there'd be a great song at the end. You had to have one of their records, and this was the album that I had. There are so many varying styles of songs on this record. You'd go from syrupy ballads to something a lot tougher, but most of the character in the work was really about the melodies and the tunes, many of which were written by Neil Diamond and people like that. It was weird that there was that whole stable of people sat in an office from 9-5, writing tunes. But they understood how it worked and how to do it, whereas with The Damned, for example, we didn't really get arrangements or dynamics when we tried to write until later on. But when you heard that variation in, if you like, quality music- and it was quality music, The Monkees, even though saying that would've got you hung back in the 70s- it made it okay to be diverse. So when The Damned moved on and we started getting to Machine Gun Etiquette and Strawberries and those kinds of records it was fair game to do something that wasn't a raucous three chord punk song, because we'd grown up with all of these bands that I'm talking about, and actually they all seemed to show an element of that. So it rubbed off."