"That must have been high school. A video played before MTV was around [on Top Of The Pops], it was 'Bang A Gong (Get It On)', Elton John played on it and really it was another song. It wasn't 'Bang A Gong' and there was this moment where Marc Bolan jumped and it wasn't even on time, and I think, "That's fucking cool! Goddamn it, how cool is this?" Such a wiseass thing to do. Either that or I guess they wanted to play the album version and they probably didn't make a video at that time and they just slathered that on. His guitar has a kind of bluesy effect, obviously his lyrics and vocal style I like - [imitates Bolan] - and I just thought this was a cool, cool record. I feel cool when I listen to it - I feel like the coolest guy in the world, just as cool as shit! Bolan took the blues and made it a lot more palatable. I love blues music, but after a while it's like, "Aw man, here we go again!" That would be like water dripping on my head if I listened to that all day. I appreciate it, goddamn it, I do, but in small doses. The A minor pentatonic - one thing I learned from the blues is get the fuck away from that pentatonic scale! I played with Link Wray one time - I played one song with him, I forgot! - and his thing to me was: "Joey, I don't want to hear any pentatonics there", and I just went out, I didn't even practice, thinking, "I'll just wing it!" I went out there and got so nervous, I threw in a pentatonic scale! I hope he didn't hear me! And he went, "Come on Joe!" He wanted me to put my leg on the monitor, total rock star, and I was thinking, "I won't do this! Please don't make me do this!" And I did it! I just felt like a douchebag. And funnily enough, we were playing at the House Of Blues."

"I really like songs that are storytelling in a way and The Kinks are great at that. “Waterloo Sunset” in particular sparked a lot of images in my mind about how you write songs and the way that melodies flow. “I think the best songs make you feel a certain way, and it’s a bit more than just the lyric really. The lyrics for “Waterloo Sunset” are brilliant but the song makes you feel like there’s a longing for a lost moment. I love the idea of two people meeting in a crowd, but with the whole atmosphere of the song, as soon as I hear it, I slip back into it and it just overwhelms me. ""There’s also a beautiful lost story within the song, the tale of a city and a river. I read that Ray Davies originally called it “Liverpool Sunset”, from when he was on tour in Liverpool and then later he changed it. “I was pretty obsessed with music from when I was quite young, and I still listen to music an awful lot. I don’t listen to these songs much anymore, but when I hear them, I love them. I think on my musical journey and absorbing that stuff, The Beatles and The Kinks were very much the beginning of it. I’m definitely sticking in an era here!"

"I was probably 21 and I was doing a lot of driving between North and South Wales. Two of my friends that I was making music with lived in a beautiful cottage in the mountains. There isn't a very good radio reception on the A470, and I was driving a classic car – a Proton! – which had a tape player. I would go to Cob Records in Porthmadog and buy a handful of tapes – classics like Michael Jackson and Madonna that would always get preference in the tape player. They were real sing-along records that were great for driving. Eventually, I remember being absolutely sick to the back teeth of them and decided to give the album Barrett a go. I knew who Syd Barrett was but never really had collected his music. I put this tape in and could not make head nor tail of what I was listening to. I couldn't unravel the songs from the music that was going on. But, weirdly, on these drives I had the compulsion to keep putting it in the tape player and because it was a tape I couldn't be bothered to do any fast-forwarding or rewinding to try and find the next song or flick through impatiently to the final song that I liked. I kind of just had to stick it out with this record. Amazingly, eventually all these songs began to show themselves and what had started off as a really arduous task became hugely, hugely rewarding. For that reason – it being a record I genuinely fell in love with and now absolutely love – I feel wholly thankful that I got it on a tape as opposed to any other format, as I think I could have completely missed it or not stuck with it. It is one of those albums that maybe I don't listen to very often anymore, but I have wonderful memories of and love deeply."