Taste Test: Jess Cornelius

THE FIRST ALBUM I BOUGHT WITH MY OWN MONEY
They were two cassettes: Paula Abdul's Forever Your Girl and Wilson Phillips' Wilson Phillips. I bought them both at the same time from the local Melody Maker in Ngaruawahia, [New Zealand], with a gift voucher I'd been given for my tenth birthday. The following year my tastes matured slightly with the purchase of Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion II, and I could impress my mum by singing “Get in the ring motherfucker” while bouncing on the trampoline.

THE ALBUM I'M LOVING RIGHT NOW
Master Of My Make-Believe by Santigold. There's some impressive vocal production on it that I intend to copy blatantly on the next album, but with one-hundredth of the budget.

MY FAVOURITE PARTY ALBUM
Probably MIA's Kala, but there are certain moments on certain evenings where even Toto's Africa will get me dancing 'round my handbag. Usually I try to take myself home before that happens, but not before I've tried to put on Snoop Dogg's Drop It Like It's Hot for the fifth time.

MY FAVOURITE COMEDOWN ALBUM
The Colour Green by Sibylle Baier. Sibylle was (or is, since she's still alive) a German folk singer who recorded a bunch of songs at home on a reel-to-reel in the early '70s. No one ever heard them because she stopped making music to focus on her family, but 30 years later her son found them and compiled them onto CD to give to family members as Christmas presents. He gave a copy to J Mascis, who passed it on to the Orange Twin label, who released the album in 2006. It's just her and a guitar, and there's a certain odd confidence about it, but it's very fragile too, which is good if you're feeling a bit that way yourself.

THE MOST SURPRISING RECORD IN MY COLLECTION
You'll find nothing surprising or embarrassing in my record collection. Except perhaps Sublime, Deftones and an '80s dance reimagining of Puccini's operas by Malcolm McLaren.

THE FIRST GIG I EVER ATTENDED
Apart from an ill-fated outing with my grandmother – and six of her ancient friends – to see Dionne Warwick sing in a park, my first real gig was a NZ band called Supergroove who had a massive hit (in NZ) called Can't Get Enough. Although even that couldn't be called a real gig, because my mum picked me up at 12am sharp and at that point the headlining band were just about to come on. Bummed out.

THE WEIRDEST GIG EXPERIENCE

I'VE HAD
I was booked to play this little festival in a tiny Spanish town called Montblanc. The stage wasn't under cover and the gig got delayed while we waited for the rain to stop. The problem was, by the time it stopped raining it was lunchtime, and in Spain everything stops for the two-hour lunch break, no matter what. The hosts were lovely and put on a big spread, but the whole thing got delayed so much I never once set foot on the stage.

MY BIGGEST NON-MUSICAL INFLUENCES
Meeting or reading about people who have completely different lives to me is always a bit of an eye-opener, and gets me thinking a lot. I'm fascinated by the choices we make in regards to what we do with our lives, or in some instances the choices people don't get to make at all. There's a lot of material there.

THE COOLEST PERSON I'VE EVER MET
That's a hard one, but Kim [Okwa Janke] is right up there. Kim owns a bar in Oakland, California, called Kim's Backyard, which is just a narrow room strung with snowflake fairy lights and metres and metres of Raiders flags. (There's no backyard either, just a concrete slab and a wooden picnic table). The night we visited, after a show in Berkeley, there was no one there but us and Kim, who is an elderly Korean lady with heavy plastic surgery, drawn-on eyebrows and a mean temperament. She wouldn't let us have water, only cans of PBR, but after downing a few cans herself she started dishing out free bowls of lethal microwave popcorn and then finally joined us on the dancefloor for a hearty rendition of The Seed (2.0) by The Roots. I might be her in 40 years.

THE BIGGEST CELEBRITY CRUSH I'VE HAD
I'm sure there have been many, but all I can remember is that I had a poster of Sebastian Bach from Skid Row on my bedroom door.

IF YOU COULD HANG OUT IN ANY TIME AND PLACE IN HISTORY
Maybe at Heide in the 1930s and '40s: living with John and Sunday Reed, having earnest conversations about art and having affairs with everyone.

IF I WASN'T MAKING MUSIC
I would be a baker. Or I'd run some kind of hippie wholefood cafe in the middle of the bush. That still might happen.