I absolutely love The Lighting Seeds and I think Ian Broudie's an incredible songwriter. You can get overshadowed by “Three Lions”, I'm not really a football fan, but every time the World Cup is on, and you hear that song blasting, it's a beautiful, beautiful, communal thing. It's absolutely incredible that they wrote a song that unifying and powerful, but to me that’s not what The Lightning Seeds are – they are their singles and albums. There’s a lot more to them than “Three Lions”.

I remember being in the van listening to them, probably on the way to and from football practice with my dad funnily enough, considering I don't give a fuck about football. But that’s where we would’ve been going in the ‘90s and I have a really strong memory of this song playing in a pub.

Charlie Chalk was a kid's show and they had Charlie Chalk soft play areas in pubs, you could get Charlie Chalk Coca-Cola as well. I remember drinking a Charlie Chalk Coca-Cola, eating a bag of Seabrook salt and vinegar and crisps, and then running off and playing in this soft play area whilst The Lightning Seeds were playing in the pub. I vividly remember that, but whether it happened or not, I don’t know.

But it’s those songs, Ian Broudie's songs are synonymous with a very joyful childhood for me, and it's funny, because there's almost a foreshadowing in that. There are songs which are very uplifting, beautiful, exciting, pop songs, but the lyrics are actually quite melancholy, and that came later in my life - “That sugar coated iceberg tastes so sweet / Until you tumble.” I definitely didn't process the lyrics when I was a kid.

I think when you're a kid you hear music that sounds good, and music shapes you in ways you don’t realise. The songs you grew up listening to definitely influence what you listen to when you're older.

I was getting into Dre, Eminem, Snoop, and I loved all that music. I still love that music, but hip hop was the dominant force around then. I was listening to Gorillaz, but on top of that it was largely a lot of hip hop, and a lot of nu metal and pop punk as well at this age, Blink 182 and Limp Bizkit were knocking around. But the hip hop route was the route I really went down.

I didn't know what the East Coast was at the time, I didn't know what the West Coast was, America was America. But I remember “The World is Yours” by NAS was on a Tony Hawk game, and I think that will have been how I got into that, because I'd got into De La Soul and Wu-Tang Clan, and then got into the older stuff.

I remember hearing “The World is Yours” and I'd ever heard anything so effortlessly cool, and usually I don't listen to effortlessly cool music. I bought that NAS album from The Music Zone in Warrington and from start to finish it was a perfect album, it felt like it was a young man's life.

I don’t know if I knew this at the time - I'm talking about this retrospectively - but something resonated within me with his words and those beats. It had been distilled to its purest form of everything this guy wanted to say about growing up in Queens. Again, I had no idea what Queens was, a suburban white kid can't relate to an inner city, young black man on a street level, but it was compelling.

It felt like he was watching the world, and I suppose that's something I ended up doing a lot myself - I'm just coming to this conclusion now.

There's not a note, not a word wasted, it’s a perfect album. A lot of albums at the time were throwaway, and so to hear a pure piece of art in Illmatic, I think it's one of the greatest albums of all time.

I think “A Certain Romance” is the best track on that album. I absolutely love the sentiment of it. It sounds like my teenage years, and it really reminds me of that time, which was when that album came out. It felt like the tribalism of high school really did start to fade - the idea of moshers, indie kids and that - everyone started to go to the same parties and became friends.

I remember that the division did seem to fade as we became adults, and that's what the song's about. I think in my bones I knew I was coming to the end of that part of my life, and I probably wouldn't see a lot of these people again. I was soon enough going to be somewhere else, doing something else.

I'm quite nostalgic. I don't want to go back to the past, but I like to look back on it, think about it and analyse it in a way that's quite interesting. And he's almost singing like he's an old man when he’s 20, looking at his school days. He is an old soul and I do feel a kinship with that.

It was everything about them and that whole album really, but that's the song that I always think about. Actually, that song and “Riot Van” - the way he writes about running from the police through the park drunk is very astute writing, but “A Certain Romance” is the one that brings it all together for me.

Much like the Yard Act albums, they're all working up to that song and the rest of it's fun. I think ours does that with “100% Endurance”, and “A Vineyard for the North” and “Blackpool Illuminations” on the new album, so I think I took a leaf from his book when organising the new album.

It was Patti Smith covering this song when I first heard it, and I don't actually know if there's a version of it available. This links back to “Bill McCai.” My old friend Joe, who I was in a band with, and we went to see The Coral together, sadly died when he was 19. At his funeral a gang of us played “Bill McCai”, “Clint Eastwood” and “Crazy Rap” by Afroman – it’s a good job camera phones didn’t exist.

Joe died and then I went to uni feeling I was leaving everything behind, I carried this with me and I thought about him a lot. But at the time, I swore I was never going to be in a band again, which was overly dramatic of a 19-year-old that's just been through something quite hard. I was going to make beats on my computer basically, that's where I thought my life was going.

Then we went to Roskilde Festival, me and a lad called Luke I'd met at uni in first year and my mate Dan from back home. We went because Pavement were playing, and we used our student loan right at the start of the year to buy the tickets. I saw Prince that weekend, which was fucking wild.

I watched Patti Smith, she did this song and said it was dedicated to anyone who'd ever lost anyone they loved. In that moment I thought about Joe, it was probably about a year on from his death and it was one of those very, ‘the earth stood still’ moments, everyone around me seemed to not exist. I was completely focused on Patti Smith delivering this song with such passion as she always does - I don't think anyone covers a song like Patti Smith.

Ever since I've always thought about that song, because it does that thing where it belittles death almost entirely, it reduces death to ‘people die, then they're gone, and they just go’. But the spirit of it is remembering them, and I think the duality of those two things, the lack of sentimentality combined with the fact that it's clearly so heartfelt is really important to me. I've never forgotten that performance. I can see it; it's playing in front of my eyes right now in my head.

I felt like that moment felt like closure. I didn't think about him very much after that for a long time because life started happening, he would crop up but the further away you get from something, it exists differently. You learn to live your grief in a different way I suppose.

Since having my son, I've thought about Joe a lot more. I keep projecting my own son onto my childhood. I keep remembering all these pieces of my past with me in the scenario, but instead of my face, it's my 2-year-old boy's face, which is quite a strange image, but I keep putting him into situations I was in. I think that's all to do with coming to terms with slowly letting go of him already. But yes, that song is beautiful. The original's great as well.

We knew when our son was going to be born, it was a planned caesarean, and it was between this and “Into My Arms” by Nick Cave. He took a few minutes longer to get out, so he ended up being born to Talking Heads.

That song is my mantra for life anyway, I like the way David Byrne writes, I suppose he's a spiritual atheist. It’s the idea of not believing in anything higher but putting your entire being into the existence you have while you have it and celebrating that. That song encapsulates life and love for me, and the pointlessness at celebrating the pointlessness of life, and putting importance on pointlessness in a way.

So, the fact that's the first music my son heard probably, I hope it gives him some sort of guidance in his time here. It's funny, I feel like if he'd been born to “Into My Arms”, he would've been a very different person.