Raw Power by The Stooges

"Raw Power for me is the greatest rock & roll record of all time. I wish Bruce Dickinson [executive producer of controversial 1997 remix attempt] had never got his paws on it. I loved the original mixes, because that’s how it should sound – the guitars are miles too loud for a normal record you’d think, but just the way the guitars come in it’s perfect. I was watching this thing on telly about Vikings disembowelling people and it’s almost like that. The guitars have angles. People go on about Exile On Main Street, which is a blues record with no tunes, but Raw Power is unbelievable. I bought it just for the cover and the titles on it. ‘Search and Destroy’, ‘Gimme Danger’ - it was right up my strasse. I was 13 or 14. I loved Iggy when I was younger, still do. I can do without all the more Motörhead stuff – he’s lost some of the finesse now. But what a song ‘Gimme Danger’ is – none of the songs hang about. Every second is important. His voice influenced the way I sang a lot. Whenever we played America Iggy would turn up, and we got on fairly good speaking terms. We were playing in New York. It was like a football changing room backstage. I was having a slash – probably in the shower, and I heard someone. I walked out – obviously not with my knob out – and it was Iggy with a tight leather jacket and blue suede shoes. He looked fantastic, and I said, ""what are you doing here?” And he said, “I always come and see your shows.”"

"He's the best frontman of all time. Iggy Pop and Nick Cave are up there for me in different ways, but Nick Cave didn't invent the stage dive. I could have picked any Stooges, but Raw Power has everything. I picked this mainly because of my love for Iggy Pop. When Post Pop Depression came out last year I fell in love with it, a collaboration between two of my favourite artists [Pop and Josh Homme], and to see this man play the Royal Albert Hall and stage diving is pretty fucking next level. It was a monumental moment. I was quite young when I first heard The Stooges. I had a couple of weird mixtapes my uncle had made. He was into stuff like The Specials but there were a few random tracks on there and the Stooges were one of them. Now, any time I have to DJ I mainly just play Iggy. He's got so many classic songs that you don't have to think about it, you can just turn to him first, a decent 40 minutes of Iggy Pop, then fill it out with whatever else you need to put in. Iggy's hits are a bit stretched out over his entire career, but Raw Power's got my favourite lyrics he's ever written. It's got the song 'Raw Power' which is just next fucking level and it's got 'Search and Destroy'. ""I'm a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm"". If you want to sum up how a man feels walking down a Hollywood street feeling like a badass, it doesn't get any better than that. The name of the album says everything you need to, it's where I took inspiration from when I was trying to come up with Modern Ruin."

"This is a record that has really been a soundtrack for life. One of my older brothers had this so I got to hear it really early on when I was about 9. It melded in with the other records I started to hear later on around 79 when I was 15. I had a basis for punk rock, and this was it – Raw Power."