Skummy

I'm 100% Team Fade Into You when it comes to Mazzy Star, it's just impossibly gorgeous. An all-time favourite of mine. Stereolab are a band I've liked everything I've ever heard from, but never known where to start. They have a lot of albums, and without ever really had a big iconic hit, it's hard to know where to dive in. I worked in a record shop once, and the owner was a major influence on my tastes for a long time - he was big into psychedelia, and a lot of jangly '80s indie pop, and had some really rare Syd Barrett stuff, but above all else he was (and is) the biggest Stereolab fan I've ever met. 50% of the time I go in there, chances are he's listening to a Stereolab bootleg or side-project. He'd go and see them every time they were on tour. They always struck me as an odd band to inspire that kind of passion, but they are lovely.

I never got big into Suede, but I love Animal Nitrate and Beautiful Ones, just never enough to get into the rest. A lot of what I hear from them is right up my street, but I think I just lumped them in more with the arse-end of Britpop stuff (Space et al) than at the beginning where they belong, and mentally wrote them off. Also, that I once did Beautiful Ones on karaoke, forgetting that the last what feels like a minute is just "la la la la la la la la la".

"Walk" is one of maybe two Pantera songs I actually like. Never saw the appeal, and I don't know if I'd even like "Walk" if it weren't attached to fun ECW memories. Most of their stuff I associate with some of the worst dickheads I know in heavy metal circles. I like the Ladysmith Black Mambazo track, but not a lot else in this list. Feels like getting to the arse-end of grunge and the first wave of Britpop, and rock music starting to get a bit stale or overly derivative. There's good stuff to come, but musically this is a bit of a hinterland before the next wave of pop music and the rise of R&B.

"Motorcycle Emptiness" is the song that got me into the Manics; I'd kind of written them off as a boring rock band in the Britpop milieu - and, to be fair to my teenage self, a lot of their stuff is exactly that - but that track is something quite special. "Creep" is a great song, and I was never a Radiohead fan, so never had the complicated relationship with it as their "hit" in the same way I know other people did. It's simple, it's almost cringeworthy in how self-indulgently miserable it is, but it works.

He's one of my favourites for putdowns of idiot right-wingers who miss the point; there was a comment on his Instagram saying "just another liberal celebrity forcing their opinion down our throat" - or words to that effect - and he replied saying "you don't have to have a degree in political science from Harvard to understand....but luckily, I do have a degree in political science from Harvard".

I don't know if they're the songs I'd have gone from for Lemonheads or L7, but glad to see them make the list. Even though most of it ended up being variations on theme of two guitars and a drumkit, the '90s always felt like there was the potential of something genuinely new to come out of the rock scene, so alongside grunge you had riot grrrl going on, plus the more college rock/indie side of things from The Lemonheads, and R.E.M. starting to become recognised as a major player, plus more interesting stuff like Morphine. The Lemonheads are a band I've always loved, and Evan Dando's solo work is lovely too - he just has a drawn out, mellow singing style that really works for me. A friend of mine was a music journalist who had a crush on him from way back in the '90s, and he was such a prick to her in an interview a few years back that he made her cry. He was in the UK for a wedding, which he then got too fucked up to attend. So there's that.

There really hasn't been an equivalent upgrade in graphical capability since then. What we've been seeing since is basically incremental changes in how quickly the same information can be processed, rather than the kind of leaps forward you got from PS1 to PS2 or, to a lesser extent, PS2 to PS3. I've seen a lot of games developers I follow on Twitter sharing comparison shots of the same game on PS4 and PS5 and saying there's absolutely nothing in the PS5 graphics that can't be achieved on current gen tech, it's mostly better use of things like light and shadow, which the PS5 can process quicker.

That is a fantastic list. The KLF were more interesting as an ongoing, slightly irritating art project than as a band - burning a million quid, the "how to have a hit single" book, and all the mad Justified Ancients of Mu Mu nonsense - but I have a real soft spot for them. They deleted their back catalogue the year after this single. It's a great fun track, though, if very of its time. I'm not a Metallica fan any more, but "Enter Sandman" is one of a handful of their songs that deserves the success they've had, just a brilliantly constructed, memorable hard rock track that builds brilliantly from an initial great riff. Not my favourite Crowded House single - that would be "Don't Dream Its Over" - but this is the one I remember being played on local radio all the time when I was a kid. It's just a nice song, nothing more spectacular than that. I love Candi Staton, I think "Young Hearts Run Free" might be the best pop song of the '70s, and she's equally brilliant with The Source. Again, it's very of its time, but wonderfully, evocatively so, rather than feeling dated. I can't imagine not liking this song. Blind Willie McTell is a good Dylan song.

Lisa is someone I find really endearing, but not particularly funny, so she doesn't add that much. I love Tim Vine, but he's completely the wrong kind of comedian for the show. Asim seems fun enough from the few episodes I've watched so far, but he doesn't have much in the way of standout moments, and Alice is really the "just there" contestant for that series. Bob Mortimer and Sally Phillips will also be a tough act to follow, but it's a massive step backwards. And I really just can't stand Russell Howard. I just get the impression that underneath his whole act, he's a really nasty piece of work - I don't know if I can justify that, but he gives me that feeling. In the task where they have to get back to the Taskmaster house and kiss Greg's portrait, him calling his manager and asking them to call him an Uber just really irritated me.

still working my way back through previous series, and I'm struggling with series 6 more than any other. I can't stand Russell Howard, and don't like any of the other contestants enough to counter that. Especially compared to the series 5 line-up, it's a real step down.

I just read this! It's really odd, and I don't know if I like it. A lovely object, though. I've just started on Richard Evans' In Defence Of History, having already read and enjoyed a couple of his previous books on the David Irving holocaust denial trial and his most recent one on Hitler/Nazi conspiracy theories, so thought I should get round to this one. I'm two chapters in and already think it should be required reading, it's fantastic stuff.

I love that Richard Thompson song, but have no idea why it's made this list. My Ministry phase ended years ago, and I haven't felt the need to listen to them since, but that's a banger all the same. No real thoughts on the rest, seems a strange list, this one. My Dad likes Bonnie Raitt.

Not a lot to say about the last list, but I love Dub Be Good To Me. Guns of Brixton is already my all-time favourite bassline, and that track just manages to give it an extra little groove. Echo a lot of other thoughts on TMBG; they're adjacent to a lot of American nerd culture stuff that I find irritating or a bit desperate, so it took me too long to get into them. Birdhouse is a masterpiece, though, as is pretty much everything on Flood.

@metalman The Sundays were one of innumerable Rough Trade jangly indie sad bands, they're nice, but not sure how they made the list. I'm a big Mother Love Bone fan; very much the music I grew up with, thanks to an older brother who was in at the ground floor on the whole grunge thing.

I love Faith No More, but Epic couldn't more obviously be a Chuck Mosley-era Faith No More track that Mike Patton showed up to lay down a vocal track for. It doesn't suit him, and just isn't his style at all. Someone once said that Faith No More were probably Mike Patton's least interesting band, and Mike Patton was probably Faith No More's least interesting vocalist. There are better tracks on the same album - From Out Of Nowhere and Falling To Pieces in particular - and better songs on subsequent albums too. It might be their most famous, but then once again we come to "does 1001 songs to listen to before you die" mean songs most worth listening to, or deemed most culturally significant? Mostly I just find Epic a bit annoying.

"Baby Did A Bad Bad Thing" is my favourite of his, which was used in Eyes Wide Shut and did pretty well after that film came out. So he's a two hit wonder, really.

Wicked Game is gorgeous. Maybe not my favourite Isaak song, but it's just incredibly sexy. I Am The Resurrection is the only Stone Roses song I like, and even then it's mostly just the intro.

It is indeed. His last CIWW appearance was also under the Ben Carter name, so the CJ Storm gimmick can be resigned to Alter Egos now, and his name changed to Ben or Benjamin Carter.

It is indeed Night Music; the brilliant old Lorne Michaels late night music show hosted by Jools Holland and David Sanborn, and some of the maddest line-ups and collaborations imaginable. It's a real "how the hell was this on TV?!" show, and the stripped down Nick Cave performances on there are really good. Johnny Cash does a great version too. Nick Cave has changed a lot as an artist since then, but Mercy Seat is a perfect example of what I think of as the "canonical" Nick Cave; all Southern Gothic barely suppressed rage and black humour. I like klezmer, but don't recall ever actually hearing that Klezmatics song. It's fun! Goran Bregovic I know purely because he did a collaboration with Scott Walker (Man From Reno) that I love, and that he wrote 2010's Serbian Eurovision entry. This song's fine. B-52s are delightful, and I think people who think of it as "cheesy" or a guilty pleasure just tend to not understand that everything about it kitsch by design. "One" is my favourite Metallica song. It feels like the most musically mature and interesting thing they ever wrote; kind of like how a lot of their fans used to talk up "Master Of Puppets", only it's a much better song than that.

Going way back to series one and, conceptually, "guess the contents of a pie without breaching the surface of the pie" is a fantastic task.

yeah, I'm absolutely delighted that the whole thing is on All4 now. It's going to replace reruns of QI and The Simpsons as my go-to TV when I can't be bothered thinking.

I really enjoyed that first episode. I'm glad that the series hasn't changed at all in moving to Channel 4 - the physical distancing in the main studio made it feel a little odd at first, but nothing that dampened my enthusiasm. This is actually my first time watching a whole series - my girlfriend loves Taskmaster, so we've watched the odd episode when I've been at her place, and a couple at my parents' recently, but I've never gone out of my way to watch it. Really looking forward to following the whole series. It helps that I love Richard Herring and Johnny Vegas, and really warmed to Katherine Parkinson in this one, while Mawaan Rizwan brilliantly fitting the "entertaining idiot" role. I thought Herring's disappearing act trick was unfairly scored, and obviously Mawaan's egg challenge was a highlight.

Sort of...? The main Campaign mode is a story thing, where in each section you play as a different fictitious wrestler. The create mode is extremely limited, but there is a mode called Battleground Challenge or something like that, where you play as a created character and earn stats etc., but I don't think there's any storyline element. It feels more like a throwback to pre-Smackdown PS1 WWF games, where the "career" mode is just a procession of singles matches. The game is awful nonsense, but not a bad time killer, and has raised a smile once or twice. I'm currently stuck in the career mode as whatever the Scottish woman is called, because the game crashes every time I try and win the Royal Rumble. Top notch stuff as always, 2k.

A really good bunch there. I love my noisy '80s/'90s rock, it's a formative influence, though "Where Is My Mind?" is one of my less liked Pixies songs, as far as the "hits" go. Probably significant in terms of importance, but for a "songs to hear before you die", I'd have gone with "Monkey Gone To Heaven" way before this one. I don't know as much Fugazi as I should, but love Waiting Room. I love Mudhoney so much. "Touch Me I'm Sick" is probably their most famous song, but deservedly so, and really does capture the essence of what they're all about. It's basically a Stooges rip-off, but a bloody good one. My Bloody Valentine make gorgeous music, but I'd have gone with something off Loveless. I'm mostly deaf in one ear because of them. Fast Car is just beautiful. I went through a major Syd Barrett phase, and still love some of his stuff, though haven't listened to him in years. "Opel" wouldn't come near my list of top songs of his, so it feels like it's here as a curiosity more than anything else. "Every Day is Like Sunday" is one of the good Morrissey solo singles - and there are a few - and one of maybe two or three that I would say hold up even alongside the best of The Smiths. Just wonderfully evocative, and I can't walk along the seafront on a cold, quiet day, without thinking of it.

love the Sugarcubes, love the Pogues, love Sisters of Mercy, so this has been a real good bunch. Not my favourite tracks by any of those bands, but all good nonetheless. "It's A Sin" is probably my favourite Pet Shop Boys song. I adore it. "Beds Are Burning" is a song I get stuck in my head on pretty much a weekly basis, but can't remember the last time I ever actually heard it. "The One I Love" might be my favourite R.E.M. song. Henry Rollins once said that he wished he could ever have written a lyric as heartless as "just a prop to occupy my time". It's so spiteful and cynical, but brilliant. "Paradise City" isn't my favourite G&R song and, these days, I'm not much of a fan of the band as a whole, but I have to admit that Appetite For Destruction is just a superb album, capturing them before they disappear up their own arses and are still just a really solid rock group. "My Michelle" is my favourite track on the album, because it has a bit more of a bar-room blues swagger, and "Welcome To The Jungle" has a bit more bite to it, while "Paradise City" feels like a bit too much of a concession towards some of the worst excesses of hair metal - still better than anything on Use Your Illusion, though. Public Enemy, man. Still so fresh and interesting, and just so far ahead of everyone else doing what they were doing at the time. I love them. Chuck D might be one of my favourite people in music.