1. Steve ReichThree Tales

I can remember very distinctly where I was when I encountered it. I was waiting to meet up with someone when I was an early teenager. I was in a record shop in Leeds – a CD shop really – in the days when there were actual listening posts, where you could listen to five or six different CDs. To me, CDs have a real mystique; records don’t really have that same feeling. I put on this thing called Three Tales, I didn’t know what it was, and I’d never heard anything like it. 

It opened a lot of doors for me musically, and eventually led me to a lot of things that I would never have encountered without that one coincidence of hearing it in that shop. I probably would never have encountered Stravinsky or Shostakovich without hearing this first. It’s diatonic, so harmonically it’s not too offensive to most people’s ears, but I was really attracted to its additive rhythms, which are so infectious and energising. A lot of the rhythms are built out of speech patterns, so you end up with a constantly shape-shifting rhythm, which I love.