Issac Holman

"This is my favourite tune ever. I can’t really describe what it is about it, it just gives me a feeling. It’s been my favourite tune for years and years and I guess that now, because I’ve loved it for so long, it’s a nostalgic feeling but I still find myself listening to it a lot. It’s still very, very current in my life - me and Laurie actually tried to learn it so that we could cover it recently, but it’s quite hard with two people! “I’d always heard it but I never really acknowledged it. We were playing a gig at The Black Heart in Camden, at this tiny little venue upstairs, and a DJ was playing it and I was ‘Oh fuck, I love this tune.’ I’d never realised how much I loved it, so I Shazamed it and I’ve just loved it ever since. “It’s so straight-up, ‘She drives me crazy’ is such a great, straight-up lyric. I love the video, I love the tune, the instrumentation is so cool and his voice is so cool. It’s just a good bit of pop and no other song has beaten it for me."

"Baxter Dury was a big inspiration for me and Laurie. Back in the day when we were first touring we’d do loads of shows and I remember that on pretty much every journey we’d have the album Happy Soup on, not talking to each other, we’d just have that on full blast. ‘Claire’ was the one that struck a chord with me, I love the honesty and sincerity of it and the softness in his voice. The instrumentation is everything that I love about a tune, it’s quite melancholic and nice and sad. “I love Baxter Dury. I love Ian Dury as well, but I think they’re in completely different ballparks, they get compared quite a lot but I don’t think they should. I actually discovered Baxter Dury through my Mum, I feel like I’m dropping my parents into this whole thing! My Mum’s very much into new and current music, she’s got her finger on the pulse and she’s always introducing me to new stuff. When this came out she was the first person who showed it to me. She said ‘This is Ian Dury’s son’ and I was ‘Woah, this is fucking sick.’ “Weirdly, Baxter was doing something on 6 Music and he played one of our tunes. He ended up talking to Laurie about the tune, a song of ours called ‘Where's Your Car Debbie?’ and I think he wanted to know more about it. Much to our excitement, we got in contact with him and ended up doing a tune with him and becoming friends with him, it was wicked."

"Thee Headcoats had a really big and important part in mine and Laurie’s sound when we first started. We really loved that rough, dirty, garagey sound and the singer Billy Childish was a massive inspiration to us, he’s a Kent boy as well. “When me and Laurie were starting the band my Dad sat us down and played us a load of records, I remember him getting a stack of records out and this was one of them. This song really shaped our sound early on, we were a two-piece and we’d found this weird set-up, kind of by mistake, where I was going to stand up and drum and Laurie was going to play guitar. My Dad went through his records and picked out two-piece bands and garage punk bands. Quite a lot of it was this sort of stuff, Billy Childish has had quite a few other bands and there was a band called The Husbands as well, there was a lot of them. “It was everything about “I’m Hurting”, the whole sound of it and the vocals. I love that his voice is so British but it’s not a London voice, it’s got a real Kent twang to it and we wanted to sound like that a bit. I really like it when people sing in their own accent, a lot of the time these days’ people are singing in American accents, so it’s really refreshing to hear someone shouting in a Kent, geezer voice. “’I’m Hurting’ was one of the ones that clicked and we just thought ‘this is amazing.’ That was six years ago and I’m very fortunate my old man was obsessively into music his whole life and I had a lot of that put into me. Without him I wouldn’t know a lot of this music that I know about now."

"My old man got me into The Streets. I was quite young when they first came out and I remember him having them on in the car constantly. Original Pirate Material was a complete game-changer for me, I can recite that whole album word for word. ‘Blinded by the Lights’ was on the second album, A Grand Don't Come for Free, and I could probably recite that whole album as well, I think it’s one of the greatest concept albums ever written. “With ‘Blinded by the Lights’ I just love the tune, it really catches a theme and I can really relate to how he’s feeling in it. It’s that feeling of being pilled-up in a club, of losing control and not really knowing what’s going on, it’s a big tune. “I really like the storytelling element of it and that was an inspiration to me. Storytelling in a song is a complete art and I definitely don’t feel like I’ve managed to do it as good as this does, I don’t know if anyone ever will."