riffs Rob Dickinson of Catherine Wheel on Talk Talk's 'Spirit of Eden'

This is an album the whole band is fond of, though the tracks "The Rainbow" and "I Believe in You" are probably the ones I would take to a desert island. I'd go as far as to say they cleanse my soul. I heard it when it came out, in 1988. My friends and I had been eagerly awaiting it, and it just took us completely by surprise.

It was probably my first experience at a very tender age of something that could move me, and it's something I haven't grown out of, which I think dots the "i" of my love for it. I have the cassette in my car and I listen to it during every journey I take. It almost seems an injustice to label it a classic record - that's the least of what it is. I suspect one reason it means so much to me is that it's been the soundtrack to love affairs I've had and it seems to have said everything which needed to be said at that time. If you could sum up the music in one soundbite, it would be that it's like the inner groanings of the soul. It's endlessly evocative, with a terrible, terrible sense of sadness which appeals to me enormously.

"The Rainbow" is the opening track. The way the instruments come in is like blood seeping out of a wall. It's the true sound of music: breathing, living, organic, it envelopes you from the first note of the harmonica. It's rare that such a sparse piece of music can be as powerful as it this.

What the album did specifically for us is bring into focus what we always believed we had in the band: a battle between the aggressive side of what our band does and the incredibly soft, introverted side. It's constantly listened to on the back of the tour bus and it's a great wind-down at the end of the night when we're having a joint or a glass of wine.