I would have been a toddler when I first heard this, and I was thinking, apart from nursery rhymes, this would have been one of the first songs that I knew the words to and remember singing. It made sense to me in many ways, being a very catchy tune. My mum and dad had it and would play it, but it was also on the radio.

I was brought up in a family where my dad and uncles and everyone worked in construction or on building sites - they were all tradespeople. Everyone had hammers and shovels, so it was symbolic of that. I came to understand at a later age that the song was adopted by the American civil rights movement. A lot of protesters at the marches on the White House, or for Luther King, used it. I guess they were saying ‘If I had the power to make a change.’

On Friday and Saturday nights, being around the house was a big thing in Glasgow, people would go to these parties. If it was granny or granddad, it would be more so folk songs, but my dad was quite a political activist, and this reminds me that music was really becoming the backdrop of our lives.

So it's an amazing song, a song that a kid can run around and sing like a nursery rhyme, but it can also work in a whole different scenario. It's amazing when music can do that.

As I was saying earlier, when I was growing up there was a lot of black music, blues music and party music, so those early rock n’ roll records, such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard, were what people loved to jump around to.

I must have watched Little Richard first with my mum, because she was such a huge music fan. There was a channel called Granada Television, which used to be adventurous, I think that was the first time Little Richard had been on TV in Britain, because he was so outrageous, and in the way that he dressed too.

David Bowie talked about him and said there would be no David Bowie without Little Richard - he was so inspired. He would have been 15 or 16 seeing him, but I was about five at the time. For me, it's really the sense of joy in the music, he made you laugh! He was such a freak, in the most complimentary way.

I had the chance to meet him, by accident actually. We were staying at the same hotel in LA at the time, and late at night he used to go down to the lobby. I don't know what he was looking for. He was an old guy dressed in the suits and all of that, but he still wanted the recognition. At a point it became almost taken for granted, but it was thrilling nonetheless, and he’s very much still a musical hero.

I probably first heard this when I was around 10. I liked to carry around a little radio and in the summer holidays, there you were, a bit bored with seven weeks off of school, so you’d go and stand around listening to music.

When you look back, sometimes there’s a song or a sound of that summer and I remember this Kinks’ song. It’s a kind of funny track, and ironically it’s about a down in heels rockstar; the taxman has taken all of his money and he’s alone in this stately home. They’ve taken his yacht and his boat and it’s a really funny image.

I can assume there’s probably some reality to that, for those bands at that time. I heard that back then they were paying something like 90% of their earnings, and The Beatles actually wrote ‘Taxman’ about it. I guess this was a tongue-in-cheek protest, but it has a great, lazy, summery sound to it. I think with the lyric - he’s so half-assed singing it - like he can’t be bothered with this stuff anymore!

It’s a really great song and it ticks so many boxes; it’s funny, sentimental, catchy as hell, and for me it summed up being a bit bored of school holidays and wondering, ‘What are we going to do today?’

It has such beautiful harmonies and it’s very quintessentially English sounding as well. Whereas The Beatles and The Rolling Stones didn’t hide their American influence, The Kinks almost sounds a bit busker-y. There’s such great imagery in this song.

The Rolling Stones had a danger to them, but there was something about hearing The Doors’ “Light My Fire” and “Riders on the Storm”, they’re so haunting because of Jim Morrison’s voice. I later realised a lot of the production and reverb gave that effect too, but what an amazing band.

If you look at how this song starts, there’s a big drum snare and then the first thing you hear is this almost Henry VIII-style harpsichord. It’s almost like he’s playing a Bach riff, then you get this deep, dark voice from Jim Morrison with quite weird lyrics from a whole other place.

That’s when I first thought that I'd gotten into music of my own. My mum and dad wouldn’t have listened to The Doors. Compounding all of that mysteriousness, was the fact that not so long after, he died. Morrison was our version of Kurt Cobain and of course through the years the whole image of Jim Morrison became more and more iconic.

At first it wasn’t clear if it was drugs or suicide and there’s still a lot of myths about it. And like a lot of tourists in Paris, when I was young, I went to the grave. Père Lachaise was kind of a rite of passage. I think he’s a gem and if I had to choose a favourite singer, it might be Morrison’s voice.

I remember that vinyl sleeve! There’s a million Bowie songs that I could've picked, but I remember being in my bedroom and listening to this repeatedly. Normally you’d think the title track would be this big blockbuster song, when in fact here you have this space-age ballad, with this piano and his falsetto. It’s definitely not rock n’ roll though, it’s very jazzy. So what is it? To me it sounded like it came from another time, another place – it was so futuristic.

I would have been 14 when this came out and normally I’d have been looking for something punchier, but you found yourself falling into this. He’s someone else who I probably think about every week - these are your heroes, they’re the soil that we somehow use to grow something of ourselves out of.

I think to make music you have to love music. And to make music you have to be really immersed. There is a mystery involved, because we all love music, but it’s how certain people take that passion to another level. I was thinking about “Aladdin Sane” there when we were talking, because I’ve got a story there as well which will tie this up, but it also bleeds into what you were asking about its influence on my music.

At school I’d walk around with my albums. Not everyone in the class was into music, but I remember one of the kids saying, ‘You’re into gigs and all that weird stuff, right?’ He said he could get me into any concert and that his brother was the head of security. “David Bowie’s playing in two weeks’ time at a sold-out matinee show”, I said. “Do you want to go?”, he replied.

True enough, he stuck to his word and took me. It was unbelievable. At the end, his brother came to collect us just before the show finished, because it being a matinee, he anticipated all the confusion. We followed him down under the stage to get out into the lane outside. We headed down the stairs while the band were still playing. I can remember someone shouting, “Stand to the side!” as Bowie and the band came swishing right past, almost touching us, it was that narrow.

When I tell people that story, they usually say ‘Well, how did you feel and what impression did that make?’ I thought, ‘I don’t know how this guy does this, or how anyone could do that.’ But I looked around and knew that I wanted to be a part of that world. I didn’t think I could be onstage, but I loved this whole world of people working in music. Lo and behold, eight years later we were on the same stage, playing to arguably an even more manic crowd in our hometown, and I had no idea how we got there.

There’s a lot to be said for being aspirational. There’s a lot to be said for seeing something and thinking, ‘I want that.’ But It’s not enough just to want it, you have to dedicate everything to get there.