It's obviously one of the greatest songs ever written. My father was obsessed with Hoagy Carmichael, my mother too, and this song was actually their special song; the one that they both loved the most together.

Hoagy was played continuously in the house when I was growing up. So was anyone involved with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra really, which at some point had people like Django Reinhardt, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, Bing Crosby, Benny Goodman… It was a very, very incredible band; Hoagy played piano and sang.

My mother once gave me a Lichtenstein print called Reverie, where there's a girl singing, and in the speech bubble behind her, it says, 'The melody haunts my reverie' which is a line from “Stardust.” It stayed on my wall for years.

I chose these Nine Songs, thinking about tracks I can always come back to, listen to, and never get sick of. They are classics in whatever genre they are, and each of them will always take me back to a particular place in my life. Hoagy Carmichael reminds me of being around the fireplace at home with my parents when I was young. It's just one of these songs that brings me comfort; it's just beautiful.

My mother and father had a jukebox; this song was number 7806 in the jukebox. Don't quote me on that! But, yes, I think it was 7806.

“Black Milk” is one of those songs that I would just leave on repeat; I think I've listened to probably more than anything else. One thing I love about this song is that the bassline doesn't change the entire way through the song. It just plays the same baseline and it's all within the root of the note.

It's the same as in “Teardrop”, which people seem to notice more. Liz Fraser’s voice on this record is just mind bending – and Mezzanine is one of the most incredible albums ever.

I remember when “Unfinished Sympathy” came out, it was at the time of the first Gulf War. Massive Attack had just released their record and were asked to change their name for Massive, because ‘massive attack’ was a term being used by the BBC and the national press. I've got a CD version of ‘Blue Lines’ that just says Massive. Then later they were allowed to print their name again, this was only for a month or something.

Funnily enough, today I'm wearing a Massive Attack sweater that I got at this show where they did the Mezzanine anniversary with Adam Curtis, the incredible videographer and documentarian. There’s a quote on the front of it that says “Conspiracies are a conspiracy” and continues at the back, “To make you feel powerless.”

The first time I heard this song might have even been in the film Withnail and I, which my dad produced. It's a cult classic English film starring Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann.

It's about two out-of-work actors who are living in Camden Town in 1969, and there's a scene where one of them's driving, trying to get the other one back for an audition. He's drunk, he's on the motorway, he's driving terribly, but there's no one on the road, and it's the ‘60s.

The scene opens with the guy who has the driving license lying in the backseat because he's fallen asleep from exhaustion, and the guy who doesn't have the license is the one drunk driving. The intro is the wah-wah guitar of Jimi Hendrix that breaks into “Voodoo Child”, and you see the car swerving all over the road until Paul McGann says to Richard E. Grant, ‘You're full of scotch, you silly tool!’

It's a very influential song to me – it affected my guitar playing more than anything else. Louder, it made me play louder. Jimi Hendrix is like an alien from another planet; his rules are entirely different. It was just raw channeling rather than practicing scales and shredding.

I was always more of a Hendrix and less of a Van Halen fan, because I always felt it was coming out of his soul rather than something that was practiced.

I'm not really into house music, and this is one of the first times that I ever got into it because Leftfield were very intelligent about how they did it. There's actually something very Blade Runner about it. To have Sex Pistols' John Lydon as a guest vocal is a crossover of genres that I'd never seen or heard before.

I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles driving through Hollywood listening to it, thinking that no one in the city was probably listening to that track. Leftism was such an underground English album. It still stands as one of the best electronic music records that has ever been made.

I'm a huge fan of Leftfield, but that first record particularly has got to be one of my top records, because when you can play it on from start to finish, there’s so much to it. They sampled things like a Bulgarian ladies choir, native flutes, Indian instruments… it had like a world music vibe, at the same time it had Lydon.

It's quite a heady concept for what the rest of the people that were making music like that at the time were doing. Leftfield, The Prodigy and Chemical were constantly pushing it forward.

Tricky leaves Massive Attack – as if Massive Attack wasn't the coolest thing in the world – and makes Maxinquaye, which is even cooler. That didn’t seem to be possible, but he did it.

“Black Steel” is Tricky and Martina’s cover of “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” by Public Enemy. I already knew that song, but to hear it with this young girl from Bristol - I think she was like 18 or 19 when she did that - rapping and singing the lyrics to “Black Steel” over and over, with that weird production… I became obsessed with it.

I love that kind of dirty, almost hip hop sound mixed with clean sugary, sweet, female vocals. It was hard and dangerous, because they were Public Enemy lyrics, but sung by a young girl from Bristol.

Maxinquaye is another one of those records I just wore out of listening, I bought it so many times. It’s absolutely brilliant. It had “Hell Is Around The Corner”, with lyrics from the previous Massive Attack record, and also that same sample that Portishead used in “Glory Box.”

Two completely different songs that came from the same place (Bristol) and used that same sample, which had obviously gone round, and it was confusing at the time. I remember being a kid and wondering ‘What’s going on, is this the same guy?’, until I realised it was a scene, it was a movement. And it was a movement that changed everything for me; all my music is influenced by that, it’s in everything I do.