"The thing about Cat Stevens is I probably prefer Mona Bone Jakon as far as the songs and production goes, it's a little bit starker, a little rawer than the other ones, but the reason I picked Tea For The Tillerman was because of the song 'Father And Son'. It's not my favourite Cat Stevens song at all but it was written for a musical that was never made called Revolutia, a blended word of 'revolution' and 'Russia'. The song sort of doesn't make sense - why is this one guy singing both of these characters? It's Cat Stevens singing the high voice and the low voice - and you wondered, god, this guy was probably at the height of his worldwide fame and he's obviously a master craftsman, he can crank out the songs but why couldn't he get this musical made? Or maybe he didn't want to - it seems like he wanted to and it just never happened. Then he was like, oh, just put it out on the next album. And I think there's a couple of other songs that seem like they could be from that same musical - 'But I Might Die Tonight' I think is kind of similar. All these albums that I really love from the 70s and late 60s - David Bowie's Diamond Dogs or The Kinks' Arthur, and they are songs from musicals basically, but it doesn't make sense there's this one guy singing it. Maybe it's ego or something, but that's why I picked that album. I looked up on Wikipedia what the reviewers thought of the album and I think the Rolling Stone guy talked about "Cat Stevens' occasional overuse of dynamics", which was the thing we were trying to do with Break Line, make things dynamic - start small and get big, and it's just so funny that at that time a reviewer would be like, "I'm sick of all these dynamics - I want more compression!"

"My parents took me to see it in a re-release — it came out in the ’60s and they re-released it in the early ’70s — and I was only seven years old, so it totally blew my mind. My parents, I think, were just completely bored and baffled by it, but I was obsessed with it. It stuck in my head, and every time it came on television I would watch it, and I saw it again in the theater as a teenager; I would go to see it whenever they revived it. It was just a movie I’ve watched a lot. I think part of the reason is…when I was a kid, I didn’t know what to make of it. It was so unlike what I’d been exposed to on TV, or by watching Disney films in the theater. It was so fascinating to me. It has a really unique status, which is in my mind like a big Hollywood epic movie about esoteric ideas — which had never really happened before that, and I don’t think it’s going to happen again. No one would ever spend that kind of money on a movie that big, and with that scope, and be that strange and slow and oblique and unexplained. Some people, of course, think it’s incredibly pretentious; I think the ideas in it are really fascinating. That Kubrick meticulousness is incredible. But part of what makes it a great movie, I think, is that as it proceeds it turns into this really intimate kind of horror-thriller — with HAL — and when I think, “Who’s a great writer who wrote in that style?,” I think Edgar Allan Poe in outer space. It becomes this real, psychological, bizarre, unexplainable thing about a murdering supercomputer! Those are some of the most handsome, greatest, cinematic scenes I’ve ever seen, so the fact that it was attached to this esoteric thing… To me, it works on so many levels. And the design, and the use of music…there’s nothing else quite like it."

"Well, speaking of authenticity, if you are going to be authentic then you really have to do it right. On the complete opposite side of the spectrum, what Bert Jansch was doing as a young man was deeply authentic and was genuinely very weird. Bert was a young person very much of his time but was making music that almost sounded ancient. From the guitar-playing point of view, he was innovating on an acoustic guitar in a way that was as powerful as Pete Townshend with electricity in The Who and as intricate as what Jimi Hendrix was doing with his space rock-blues. Vocally, Bert was almost punky and in the way he and his peers went about their lives, he was one of the very first lo-fi musicians - and that was 40 or 50 years ago. Bert was one of my few real heroes. I got to be friends with him for about ten years before he died. He was an amazing person and because we were friends I got to find out that the lifestyle choice of the folkies in Soho in the 60s was a very deliberate and radical. They made certain choices and the fact their music was not in the charts was no accident. In Bert's case, he was the king of the UK beats as a result of the beat poet influence on his generation. Also, he was tuned into the political climate of the time and things like the CND movement and the radical student scene. Bert was a lot more than an earnest folky with an acoustic guitar. I particularly like his second record. The album before it [1965's Bert Jansch] is more revered and held up by most journalists as being the seminal one, but I think the songs are better on It Don't Bother Me, particularly the title track. The fact that they were both recorded in a kitchen at his mate's house is another reason why it has never dated."

"So the The Wolf King Of L.A. and There's A Riot Goin' On were both recorded in the same studio. John Phillips bought Jeanette McDonald, a Hollywood actress, a mansion in Bel Air. And he illegally built a studio in the attic, which was huge. I guess there were building restrictions, but he just wanted to build a recording studio in there. He recorded the album in that place. Now coming on to the transcendent, joyous, pop glory of The Mamas & The Papas, The Wolf King Of L.A. is a very strange album. I think John was hanging out with Gram Parsons and as a result, the record is a country-soul-pop album. In The Mamas & The Papas, he was writing for a pop audience and I guess that was a message to Michelle Phillips because they're both adulterers, I think. John would write a song and get Denny Doherty to sing it because he knew he was having an affair with his wife. John was quite a dark guy! They were very personal songs, but also universal because he was writing for a pop audience. But with Wolf King, he went solo. Phillips became deeply addicted to heroin, coke and everything else. He was a very advanced drug addict. Wolf King Of L.A. is a very soulful album. John wrote and arranged the songs for The Mamas & The Papas but his voice was hidden in the mix as Denny and Michelle had incredible voices. But on this album, it's just his voice. And I believe that the session musicians were Phil Spector's Wrecking Crew and are the same guys who played on The Mamas & The Papas records. They loved John Phillips and thought he was a fucking great guy. It's one of those records I haven't stopped playing for 30 years and a great document of rock and LA culture in the late '60s. It's also got a great cover with John wearing a top hat standing on Malibu beach with the sun setting looking absolutely wasted."

"""When VU came out in 1985, everyone I knew had absorbed the official Velvets albums from the late 60s and early 70s, and had listened to all the bootlegs they could get their hands on. We had heard in the press mention of lost recordings and there were a couple of those songs on bootlegs that were hard to get. So, when this album came out it was like finding The Commandments 11 to 20. I almost didn't want to get my hopes up too much as it promised amazing things. When I did get it, I couldn't believe how good it was. It has a particularly important part in my life, in that The Smiths were already going at that point and we were a successful band. To be hit by something as a fan of music when you are already number one in the album charts yourself - I think Meat Is Murder had just come out at that point - was an utterly brilliant thing. It dropped into my life like a ton of inspiration. I was obsessed with it and, in particular, the versions of 'I Can't Stand It' and 'Foggy Notion'. I couldn't understand why that version of 'Ocean' hadn't come out before as it was easily the best one. I played 'I Can't Stand It' so many times that it stuck in my subconscious and that came out as the inspiration for the rhythm part on the song 'The Queen Is Dead'. So, the VU album was what I was listening to almost exclusively before I started writing the album The Queen Is Dead. The earlier Velvets albums are so revered that to better them is quite a feat. I have been in many an argument with people who think I am insane for preferring this record. When you take away the reverence for the early albums - which are undeniably incredibly important - VU is my favourite listen."""