Share a song from an album you think has great cover art.

Not one of my favourite Pink Floyd albums, but Ummagumma has genuinely brilliant cover art: a picture recursively appearing within itself that pulls you in and rewards closer attention as each iteration subtly changes.

Post one of your favorite songs with the name of a city, town, state or country in the title.

I didn’t have to think too hard about this one. The context in which I first heard the song was very different from how I listen today, but Belfast by Orbital remains beautiful and uplifting: a modern hymn, cresting on a sample of medieval plainsong from Hildegard of Bingen’s O Euchari, before dissolving into a warm wave of swaying, squelching electronica.

Post a track by a solo artist you haven't yet posted.

I suppose Björk’s dreamy Hyper-ballad was originally written as a love song about the trade-offs made in relationships, and retreating into an inner world as a refuge. Listening to it again now, particularly alongside the wonderful video directed by Michel Gondry, it still reads that way. But lingering on the first part of the title, I wonder if, in the online world we inhabit now, another interpretation might be the cost of showing up in a particular way while holding on to the parts of yourself that remain authentically individual.

I go through all this Before you wake up So I can feel happier To be safe up here with you

A song with a memorable video or TV performance

Thursday, 17th August 1995. Blur and Oasis go head to head on Top of the Pops. It wasn’t the songs themselves, neither of which showed them at their peak, or the performances, which were standard lip-sync affairs. Nor was it the rivalry eagerly stoked by the tabloid press or the cultural divide the bands supposedly represented. Instead, then and now, all these years later, it captured an incredibly bright moment in time: change was in the air and Britannia was cool. Sometimes the memory is more meaningful than the music.

What is your favourite cover song?

You could build a mixtape or playlist from cover versions of The Korgis rueful Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime, but Beck’s lush interpretation is a personal favourite.

What song did you hate at first and then fell in love with?

I wouldn’t say I hated Room on Fire by The Strokes when it was released, but I do remember thinking it compared unfavourably with Is This It, which breathlessly captured the zeitgeist. Time has softened my opinion, and I now listen to it as often and with the same fondness as their flawless debut. Both records take me back to the early 2000s and the excitement of visiting New York for the first time.

Do you have a fun story about how you discovered a certain song?

Some fun stories about how I’ve discovered music come to mind, but they’re probably best left untold. Instead, I’m thinking about a record introduced to me by my funny, talented friend Steve, who I met at university. The first time he invited me to his room, he put on Stanley Road by Paul Weller. It was new to me then, and we listened together, smoking in companionable silence. Thirty years on, when I play the record, I’m taken back to the moment I knew I’d met someone who would always be there: a true friend. I got plenty wrong in those days, still do, truth be told, but about this I was right.

A song from the 2000s that you like or means something to you.

Franz Ferdinand were already on my radar, but their second single, Take Me Out, delivered the knockout punch. Listening to it now, twenty-odd years later, takes me back to the 2000s, when it felt like the sliding doors had closed on one chapter of my life and everything seemed to accelerate.

What song did you discover in a tv show or movie?

I can’t say for certain whether I discovered Black by Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi through Breaking Bad, but its use in the final scene of Face Off, the series four finale is unforgettable. The song’s spaghetti-western stylings and dark, dreamy lyrics cast a foreboding shadow over the treacherous power struggle culminating in the episode’s explosive ending and underline the consequences of crossing the point of no return.

What is your favourite soundtrack?

I suppose everyone has a tendency to look through rose-tinted glasses at the period when they come of age and their cultural identity takes shape. So, without skipping a beat, Trainspotting would be my favourite soundtrack. I read the book as a first-year university student. Then, when the film adaptation came out, I saw it at the cinema several times, even persuading my mum to come along once. She didn’t care for it. The entire soundtrack is impeccable, but in retrospect, Born Slippy by Underworld, which is perfectly choreographed to the film’s final scene, captures the spirit of the times and opens a window back onto those hedonistic, carefree years.