I was living in Surrey at a formative age when punk happened. I loved it, but going against the grain - as I always did, and I always will - as soon as it happened, I was looking for other stuff as well. There was a record shop in Croydon called Beanos that had all the punk singles, but upstairs there was a blind spot where you could pinch as many reggae and soul records as you liked.

In 1978 nobody was interested in records from ten years ago but they had all these decade old reggae singles, which I robbed and robbed, and quite a few soul ones from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Amongst them was lots of Blue Beat records, and I managed to thieve loads of those. I was listening to punk, but I was also listening to Blue Beat, Ska, and all the different genres of reggae, like Lovers Rock.

So I had this collection - a pinched collection unfortunately - and amongst it was Owen Gray and Chuck & Darby. Owen Gray sang with Millie Small and it was a weird mixture, a bit of Calypso instrument wise and an eight bar blues on piano, but I absolutely loved this Ska beat. I bought a trombone from a bloke I worked in an office with for 20 quid and I learned by playing along to these records. There was Chuck & Darby, Owen Gray, Folkes Brothers, Theo Beckford and lots of really wild, pretty out of tune solos on them and I tried to play along, I didn’t ever teach myself anything.

I didn't have the money to buy a lot of records at the time, but later on when it came to vinyl and CDs, I bought more Owen Gray records. “Grandma, Grandpa” would have been in my charts. I’d also started getting into Mod too, but I didn't want to buy the ordinary Mod stuff. This sounded cooler than that, and nobody else had it. It's a really good pop song.

BEST FIT: I read about Silas Hogan, he ended up going back to his job at an Exxon oil refinery after his record deal didn't work out.

Ah, that’s a shame. I didn’t get invited to many parties at school - I was probably too into football - but when I did go to them, people brought their own records and cassettes. I liked Josh White, Blind Boy Fuller and Big Bill Broonzy, but no one else was into them and they’d walk out of the room if I played them. But with “Just Give Me A Chance” people would say ‘I like this, it’s got a good grove to it’. It’s actually a similar groove to “Tequila” by The Champs, and I loved it.

I got it in a second-hand shop in probably 1981 and I’ve since bought it on CD. I was living in South London-ish at the time, I would root through Oxfam or wherever they had good records and if it was black and bluesy looking, I’d buy it. They were only 50p. At night I’d go and see artists like Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee and then I’d buy their records in Oxfam, but also significantly, I got records by Silas Hogan and Slim Harpo, because that’s where I learned to play harmonica, I’d play them back-to-back. I tried to get a harmonica that fitted the key, but I bought one and found it was totally the wrong key.

Around the same time, I also listened to and wrote down everything John Peel played. He’d play the Buzzcocks single and we’d buy it. People forget that for a very short time Punk was popular with everybody, apart from Teddy boys. Johnny Rotten was so popular and everybody loved him flicking V’s at society. John Peel was listened to by 1000s of kids.

BEST FIT: Listening to John Peel got me into The Smiths. I’d play their songs at parties, but everyone wanted to hear Wham! instead.

The Smiths was another push for the John Peel audience. They were massive, you weren’t alone, but they weren't mainstream. Punk was on Top of the Pops between ‘77 and ‘79 nearly every week, so it was a bit easier to put a Buzzcocks record on at a party than it would be with The Smiths.

BEST FIT: Was it easy to put Silas Hogan on at a party?!

Well, it was better than Blind Boy Fuller. I had a couple mates that stuck with me. One of them bought a Washboard Sam record, because he played with Blind Boy Fuller, and he said ‘See? You had some influence.”

This was another second-hand record and it was the sort of thing I’d buy, because it was affordable when I was working on a poor wage in an office. It took me quite a few listens. I’d have to look at the record sleeve, but I’ve got a feeling this song is at the end of one side and I didn’t listen to it initially.

She had that big hit “With You I'm Born Again” with Billy Preston and on this record she had "Universal Sound of the World (Your Kiss Is Sweet)", which was a big pop hit at the time. Other than that I saw her as a bit middle of the road, but being married to Stevie Wonder would be a lot of fun I think. I don’t know if “I Wanna Be by Your Side” was a hit, but when I heard it on this record I thought ‘I know Syreeta.’ It might have been a hit in America.

Before the internet, I was fascinated by who G.C. Cameron was because he's credited as the co-singer, and I was also fascinated that the album's called Stevie Wonder Presents: Syreeta. I knew Stevie Wonder played on it, but he plays drums on the end section and it’s so brilliant. I'm not big on picking out instruments and saying, ‘That’s a brilliant solo’, but whilst G.C. Cameron and Syreeta go mad - G.C. Cameron is singing falsetto - Stevie Wonder is going on a totally different, random beat and it's fantastic. I always envisaged that G.C. Cameron was only ever asked do one song and that was it, but I’ve since found out he was in The Spinners.

BEST FIT: He sang on “It’s a Shame”, which is a hell of a tune and was co-written by Stevie Wonder and Syreeta.

I love that song. I had no idea until recently that he sang on it, because I didn't know he was in The Spinners. And I also thought it was two different voices, because it sounds like The Temptations or The Four Tops, where it goes from one voice to the other. He impersonated people and made records to deliberately sound like other people, but that's not what he does on this song. It’s beautiful.

I love Syreeta, I love the stuff she did with Billy Preston, and I love Stevie Wonder. There were loads of soul songs I could have picked and loads of solo artists that I like above Syreeta - Al Green, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin - but I thought that because of G.C. Cameron being a bit of an underdog and a background character that I’d pick this one. It's a favourite.

BEST FIT: You tweeted this song, saying your wife thinks that you sing like him.

She does say that. There’s a particular song, “Something in the Water”, that she thinks I sound like him on, so I didn't pick that one, and it has a bit of a silly video as well.

With Pokey LaFarge and Sallie Ford, it’s sort of ‘50s Americana, for want of a better word. And by Americana – and I don't like the word, or those sorts of labels – I mean they’re typically American in the way they dress, in the way they sound and the feel of it. I love the way Pokey LaFarge dresses, he's out there in that ‘50s garb and he's got such a great face to go with it. He looks like one of those racist rockabillies from the 1950s (laughs). He looks like a couple of people I know as well.

There’s a few of them, like JD McPherson and Langhorne Slim, who seem to celebrate that culture of ‘50s rockabilly country, and they’re such good players. I don't notice how good they are at it until I turn around to my band – who are brilliant musicians – and I say, ‘Try and sound like that’. They laugh at me and say, ‘We’ll try it’, and they do, but you get something else. Pokey LaFarge is surrounded by authentic people who’ve played that music probably since they were very young. He's amazing, a really good songwriter and I love “Lucky Sometimes”, it’s such a joyous song.

BEST FIT: What makes it sound so joyous?

It’s the simplicity of it. I found writing simplicity in a song difficult previously, and to write a song like “Lucky Sometimes” has always been quite difficult. All of my love songs - or whatever you want to call them – always had to have a twist at the end, where somebody was stabbed or an anvil fell on their head, but I’ve gotten much better at writing straightforward love songs.

But I do still envy somebody who's able to get a really simple message, an uncomplicated message, and maybe they envy me for getting the complicated one.

I often quote people as being lyrical influences and I always forget Louis Jordan, because people like Smokey Robinson, Elvis Costello and Bill Withers are more serious. Quite often I use humour in my lyrics and Louis Jordan is a really, really humorous lyricist, he often talks about weight issues.

I was looking up his songs before I spoke to you, and I always remember “I Like ’Em Fat Like That”, which got in my charts, but there were other ones like “The Chicks I Pick Are Slender, Tender and Tall” and “You're Much Too Fat (And That's That). His lyrics are like Juke Joint patter. You can imagine him going into the Juke Joints in the ‘40s and ’50s and singing these songs about the different people in there.

I absolutely love him as a lyricist, as a singer and a player and I've got many, many of his records. I have done since Joe Jackson covered one of his songs, “Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby” on his fourth album, which was a jazz album. Then I looked into him and became a big fan, thanks to Joe Jackson.

BEST FIT: What do you like about the lyrics?

They’re funny. With this song, it’s that he knows it will end as soon as he runs out of money. It's not personal to me, I don't value money like that, but in ‘50s America there was this explosion of money. And particularly in some parts of the black community, where for the first time, black people could buy Chevrolet's. I love the fact that he's written about losing it straightaway.

It was a great, great period of time for music and it must have been difficult for him to sing and write these songs, knowing that he wasn't going to be taken as seriously as some of what you would call the jazz greats of the period, like Miles Davis, where they were moving on to what they called at the time ‘modern jazz’.

Louis Jordan was probably left feeling as though trad jazz, more traditional messages and this sort of skat-talking and juke joint bad-mouthing felt a little bit out of date, but I absolutely love it.