"One of my favorite films of all time has got to be Mary Poppins. Well I was old enough to remember it when it came out, but I don’t think I saw it in the cinema, I think I saw it when it eventually came on television. In those days, you had to wait about six or seven years before a film got from the f–king cinemas to the television, and it being Disney, they never actually released their films. It was a very clever policy: They just re-released them every 10 years. I think it’s one of those movies. I was having a very depressing time recently working on a job. I was feeling particularly bad and I put the television on on a Sunday afternoon, and Dick Van Dyke was singing “Chim Chimney” — it just lifted my spirits. Everybody criticized his Cockney accent — and even at the time I probably joined in — and you can criticize his Cockney accent, but you cannot criticize his brilliant comic dancing. It’s f–king wonderful. Oh, it’s wonderful. And the quality of the work: The beauty of that film, the simplicity of it and the way it was made and directed; the charm. The way it appeals to people — it’s the old cliché, you know: Eight or 80. It’s a wonderful piece of work. And it’s magical. It’s one of those films, you know, that you can dip into. If you’re ever feeling low, stick it on and you’ll feel much better. If you haven’t got any illegal drugs, put that on and you’ll be alright. [Laughs]"

"This is a period of transition, which all of those early albums were. If you look at Bowie between 1967 and 1970/1 there was no constant in his life, whether he was a mod, whether he was going through his Dylan period with Space Oddity, God knows what The Man Who Sold The World is… it's like a prog heavy metal album really… He was changing the whole time. But if you look at Hunky Dory, I think he just thought that his future was as a songwriter as well as a performer, because I've also heard that The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars was his last crack at [becoming famous]. And the amazing thing about this album was two weeks after he finished it he was back in the studio doing Ziggy Stardust. There was a two week gap between the studio visits for those two records and they're so radically different from each other. So I think Bowie just thought, 'Right I'm having one last crack at being a pop star and I've written all these great songs.' And they are great songs on this album, 'Bewlay Brothers', 'Quicksand', 'Life On Mars'… When he wrote this song he'd just put in to write the lyrics for 'My Way' for Frank Sinatra and he got rebuffed and was really pissed off about it. So he wrote that song to say, 'This is what I can do.' And it is a great song: one of the greatest songs ever. I think he wrote it genuinely thinking that one day someone like Frank Sinatra would record a version of it."

"This had a massive impact on the way my parents brought us up, especially my dad, who's a singer himself. Here were a family from the North digging into old songs and traditions, and it made Dad really interested in doing the same. He became a member of a longsword team – I know – and then he got into reviving Mummers' plays, including the only surviving Mummers' play including its own dance. Every Boxing Day, us kids would be dragged down to see it, Dad playing this character who would be killed and brought to life again [laughs]. So many of our rituals as a family were about similar things: carolling on the green, singing folk in the pub and having this real passion for the seasons. For me, revisiting tradition is very rooted in wanting to recognise social struggles, the situations of the working classes, and the pastoral. These songs aren't about looking backwards and inwards, but about learning about the realities of your culture and wanting to share it with others. I remembering going to a Swedish festival some time ago, being encouraged to share songs from where I was from, and realising then what a very powerful currency those songs were. They help you connect with other countries' forgotten stories and emotions – and actually, that's something that happened to me in Harare doing Africa Express as well. These Ethiopian women encouraging me to sing for them, and then watching their reactions… it's very moving seeing people respond to these songs from different parts of the world. It makes you realise there's so much that connects us."

"I've got some family in Canada, and when I was about 12 we went over for a holiday. When we came back, my cousins had given my brother a load of American music, and that was really the first time that I had heard Smashing Pumpkins. And he'd come back and play these tapes and it was like: ""Wow! Music from America!"" This was the time before the internet, and we didn't have a TV either, so this was all kind of exotic. I remember not really realising that they were playing guitars because it didn't really sound like that. I couldn't tell what it was made of. It sounded like machinery and that it was made of fiddly twiddly weird tones, and obviously with his voice on top of it, I was like, ""What the hell is this?!"" I remember for a year not really liking it, but my brother kept on playing it, and it slowly crept into me. That whole album is so deeply produced that the playing on it, the sound on it, is just fucking awesome. The breadth of different sounds are amazing. Every intro is like a perfect little new world opening up. You always think of Billy Corgan being a total egomaniac locking the other band members out of the studio as the story goes, making Jimmy Chamberlin rehearse for 12 hours a day until the drums were perfect. The end result is this perfect dreamy, shoegaze-y album with a hard core, yet it's also quite gentle as well, which I think is a common theme with all the albums I've chosen."