BEST FIT: When I saw Michael Jackson on here, my first thought went right back to school and seeing the cassette being passed around, like it was currency. I think a lot of people have that same relationship to that album.

YOUNG: "Yes, it’s so interesting. I bet you've got the same thing as I have - you can just see the cover so clearly, the writing in red, the black jacket. Do you remember the video?"

The Scorsese clip, yeah.

"I don't know where we managed to watch that video. I'm sure we’d only have been able to see it on Top of the Pops. We didn't have MTV - I think it had started at that point but we wouldn't have had it. But also I was at boarding school - a heinous, horribly abusive school. Music wasn't wasn't allowed apart from one hour on Wednesdays, an hour on Saturdays, and maybe two on Sundays.

"But we’d sneak in walkmans and things like that. It was basically Madonna, Michael Jackson and Prince - they were the three massive pop stars of the time. I feel like they invented pop in the '80s. There was no-one bigger then and he was the biggest of the lot. I was probably ten and he was the number one pop star."

Every track on that record is pretty much a single isn't?

"Every song seemed like it was its own record. It was so varied as an album and that wasn’t lost on a ten-year-old. You just listened to it on repeat. I can see where I was, at my desk, opening up the inlay and singing along to the lyrics."

I forget how much fetishism there was around cassette inlays

"Yes, more than CDs - and there was a lot of daydreaming that went with it. I think I liked “Bad” because I really didn’t like the establishment at school and that played into it a bit."

I remember reading how the song was actually about this kid from a bad neighborhood who manages to go to private school and better himself - and then comes back to the old neighborhood during the school holidays and his old friends start giving him trouble.

"No! That’s so weird!"

It was meant to be a duet with Prince too but he had issues with the first line (“Your butt is mine”)

"That’s such good pop trivia! Bad is definitely the album that sums up those times for me."

YOUNG: "It’s pretty curveball for the biggest band in the world to open a record with a song about taxes.

"It’s interesting that I went on to do politics. I would have been 14 when I heard “Taxman”. It’s quite a jolly song but it’s a protest song, a political song. I really bought into it. I’d never heard anything like it, actually. It's like a quiet protest song. It's not what you'd think, is it? Imagine if it was a protest song now?

"That record (Revolver) and Abbey Road were the two CDs we got when they were first coming out. I remember we went on this holiday and that’s all we played in the car. It’s nice because it’s a sharing memory with my family."

BEST FIT: I was trying to think about some sort of thread that ties the songs you chose together and what I came up with is that most of them are relatively commercial songs, but they're really pushing an experimental envelope in terms of structure and lyric and melody to see where pop music can go?

"It’s clever and it’s funny. I really loved their comedy. They’re funny! It’s that Monty Python thing. Those albums have always been with me. They’re one of my staples but it’s the family connection as much as anything else.

"I was also fascinated by the idea that my parents were teenagers when The Beatles came to fruition. It’s quite special to have a tie to the '60s and understand what that time was. So it opened up a lot of conversations: about Radio Caroline, about how the BBC only used to play orchestral covers of certain pop songs."

Paul McCartney never quite gets the credit he deserves as a vocalist, does he?

"He's one of my favourite male vocalists. He’s just this incredible rock and roll singer and I think things like his vibrato have influenced me quite a lot. Even though it might not be obvious to others, it is to me. These people are like your teachers growing up: Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson, Annie Lennox. You sing along and it’s basically doing singing lessons. It’s your own version of Stars in Your Eyes."

YOUNG: "I got the album on cassette when I was either 12 or 13. It was summer and I would just sit in the bath and play Tracy Chapman from beginning to end on my parents ghetto blaster. And that would be my life, every day!"

BEST FIT: I saw her performance of this song on Late Night With Seth Meyers before the election last year and I was amazed at how intact her voice is. Nothing's changed at all.

"It's weird because even though I was 13, every song really got me - from “Revolution” through to “Across the Lines” to that song about domestic abuse “Behind the Wall.” It got me. “Fast Car” was one of the songs I really didn’t understand that much to be honest, but whenever it comes on I take a breath. There’s an amazing mixture of real melancholy and a peacefulness about it."

It’s incredibly fleshed out for a debut album.

"Yes, and I think that’s why it has to be in my top ten records. She’s still a brilliant writer, but she’s very private. She doesnt say much live. She’s a bit of an enigma."

BEST FIT: I often think about D’Angelo in the same breath as Terence Trent D’Arby.

YOUNG: "Yes, I think Vibrator was around the same time as "Brown Sugar". R&B pop was massive and we had MTV at home and would watch MTV Base with Trevor Nelson. I remember the video first of all, which was so cool. He was another beautiful human being to look at and it was so cool that this was in the pop world. He was probably one of the biggest influences on me and the group I was friends with. We all liked R&B pop - everyone from Angie Stone to Boyz II Men to Mary Mary, Lauryn Hill, it just went on and on.

"He had amazing musicians, like the bass player Pino Palladino. He’s another one where his band is like the band. I think he was with Angie Stone at that time, she did some writing on that record. That album was just massive for me."

It was five years before his next record I think.

"Voodoo was a bit wacky. but still so amazing. It's a little bit like Vibrator - you had to work hard to get into it. And then he did Black Messiah about five years ago which is incredible. D’Angelo is just one of those givens and such a big influence to me."

It’s quite a small body of work to put out over almost 30 years.

"I think he had quite a difficult time in his personal life. There’s no-one else really like him either. It’s not like he’s the best singer in the world - there’s better musicians - but the whole thing is just really unique."

YOUNG: "I picked him because I heard this record when I was in Germany, doing something for a pop magazine, like their version of Smash Hits. This is when I used to do things internationally, and was between my first and second records. Then I was doing these Saturday shows in Italy at various ampitheatres - like an Italian version of Saturday Night Takeaway - alongside amazing artist's from across the world, like Skunk Anansie, Roots Manuva and Garbage. And then Robin Thicke played at one of them.

"I emailed Simon Fuller, my manager, and said ‘I need to write with this man!’ He didn't write very much with other people back then, and he wasn’t a big artist. But he’d sound like Micheal Jackson one minute, and The Beatles the next, and then Marvin Gaye.

"I did get to write with him and I was terrified. He’s really straight you know - a lad - and I was not. And I was not so confident then either. I don’t know if he liked me or not. I’m not sure if I liked him to be honest. But I knew he would get me something interesting and we wrote a song called “Very Kind” which appeared on my second album, and it's just such a great tune.

"I also liked the fact that he wasn't like all the other pop writers writing at that time, because you just go with the same old fucks, and he wasn’t, and he had soul."

BEST FIT: How was the experience?

"He worked with a guy called Pro J - so handsome - and he had quite a fancy house. I think his dad was a gameshow host and he came from a showbiz family. He had a very glamorous wife who was lovely, and he had brilliant sounds, that were more R&B sounds. I wrote with quite a few R&B people but it never worked out, because they weren’t pop enough. He seemed to be at the right level. It was a bit of a gamechanger for me actually. I was quite proud of hunting him down. It didn’t get me a massive hit, but it definitely brought something in."

He doesn’t seems like an obvious choice as a collaborator for you.

"I quite like working with people that other people don't work with, who aren't necessarily the obvious ones. I don't like working with the obvious ones, even though they might get me a hit. It just feels so unimaginative.

"I think after that he did some stuff with Robbie and he worked a lot with Pharrell Williams and Justin Timberlake on the side. He was in that world, which I found hysterical, because I was just so square, but I think he respected my singing. And that record is amazing."

Why that song?

"Because it's so unique. I don’t know what bracket you could put it in, it has many different influences. They did a reworking of it actually, because then there was the film called Shooter that they used it in. It starts off with such a brilliant bassline, it's so unique and I can hear all the different influences, from Stevie through to The Beatles. There’s everything in that tune. It's not necessarily the best song on the record, but it's a really interesting song."

Did you follow him after that?

"Well, he had a big hit with his second album The Evolution of Robin Thicke. I'd come back to LA and it was fucking everywhere, he was on Oprah, it was everywhere. And he’d done a song with Faith Evans (“Got 2 Be Down”) and it was an amazing ballad... and then he did “Blurred Lines” with Pharrell.

"Sometimes people as writers and artists, they can be very different as pop stars. I just knew him a writer, even though I'd seen him play in Italy. And then there was the big backlash for that song, and also because of the Marvin Gaye thing. And then the Miley Cyrus thing happened at the MTV Awards, and I think he had an affair."

I have to admit, I’d forgotten the exact nature of the various things he’d done that led to him getting cancelled.

"It’s quite interesting, isn't it? Before you arrived today, I was reading a thing on Beenie Man. I really like Trevor Nelson's radio show and I was listening to it on the way back from town last night. I was like: 'Mental note to self, wake up tomorrow and check out how homophobic Beenie Man is.' And I was reading up on him… should his music be played on Radio Two? I just don't know. Because he said some awful things.

"But my personal history with Robin Thicke is when I was quite young and I was quite proud of it. Because I was very nervous to write with big, American, very straight writers. It was not necessarily a pleasure, but I’m pleased that I did it."

Crying on the Bathroom Floor is released on 6 August via Cooking Vinyl