I’ve known Luke some years, through our daughters and through our wives. He lives close to me in our small Ocean-side town, now unfortunately growing in an unchecked way. Like a tumour. Despite proximity we see each other rarely, but not by design. Instinctively understated and averse to large (and perhaps small) social gatherings, he’s a man after my own heart. With respect to social gatherings. He also works odd, very late hours from home. He makes me laugh and smile, his sharp, laconic mind goes with mine immediately, tangentially, away on my flights of fancy and whimsy. He and I in conversation almost define the wonderful ‘take light things seriously, serious things lightly’ ethos. As a first interviewee he surprised me with his willingness to ‘go there’, wherever ‘there’ is, and I could have talked to him until the sheep came home. You might detect, nonetheless, a certain acceleration towards the end, when I realised how long we had been talking! A wonderful husband, father and friend. Notice also how my very first guest already tries to subvert the process of song (and book) choice. And invents a ‘porn forest’.

I don’t listen to the album often nowadays, and I wouldn’t load it onto Voyager or anything …. but I was 16, when what you liked was indistinguishable from the image you wanted to project, and I loved it self-consciously and completely unironically.

I’d be surprised if I’ve listened to this album start-to-finish fewer than 1000 times.

If I could have a David Bowie album I wouldn’t pick Scary Monsters, but I’d take the bleakness of this song over the rest, especially alone on a space station.

Ashes to Ashes, Faith No More. It almost made the list and it has the same name, so surely I get that too.

(No Luke, you don’t)

We spent a year living out of backpacks in 2000, and we had one Sony Discman, and three CDs. This was one of them, so it could have been Weezer – The Blue Album, or Offspring – Smash, but I think I chose correctly.

Not necessarily their best song, nor necessarily their best album, but it’s eight and half minutes long and contains the makings of several very good songs, including one of the greatest riffs ever written, so I’m getting good value.

Tool are prickly and pretentious, and in my early 30s so was I, but in the end it’s a metal fix without the cringe factor. It also reflects a period when I spent a lot of time alone, on public transport or at my desk, melancholy if not unhappy, just me and my thoughts and metal. It’s also probably why my kids have to tell me when my phone is ringing.

Everyone needs a theme song, something to cheer them up, and those lyrics…

W