"That song came out in 1967, but I don’t care when you it it, it still doesn’t sound dated. It’s always current. You just can’t beat it. All singers aspired to be Sam. He was a beautiful man. Very charming, engaging – a great artist with a whole lotta personality. It was thrilling for me – and every other woman – to be in the room with him. When I first heard ‘You Send Me,’ I was driving down South, traveling with my dad, doing services in various city auditoriums and arenas [Franklin would have been about 15]. My sister Erma and I were in the car, and when that came on the radio, we had to stop. It was pandemonium. We got out of the car, and we were just running around the car, screaming, ‘Sam was on! Sam was on! Sam is on the radio! Listen to this song!’ And we were just having one fit on the highway. We were just thrilled, because he had just left the gospel field. That was the first time hearing what he did after he leaving it. So it was super exciting for us. Sam was what you call a singer’s singer. My dad used to tell me not to copy him, that I had a voice. He stopped that early on, and he was absolutely right. As a performer, he was very simplistic. He didn’t do a lot of running around on the stage, and because he knew he didn’t have to. He had a voice, and he didn’t have to do anything but stand in one place and wipe you out."

"That album is my favourite because it's the one that feels most concise. Electric Ladyland I love, but it does sprawl a little bit and some of the later ones don't feel like he's absolutely at his peak. The early ones - Are You Experienced? - I do love them but it feels like there's lots of singles. So for me, Axis: Bold As Love has that depth. The production is just fantastic as well. 'If 6 Was 9', embodies that whole wild, epic, Jimi Hendrix thing, in a concise pop song. Him saying about the businessmen going down the street, ""you can't dress like me"", and ""I'm gonna wave my freak flag"". For a long time, my favourite Jimi Hendrix stuff was the live stuff - he's one of those guys where you can be a fan of the the live stuff and it's almost a completely different artist to the albums. Whereas this one feels like it's got that spirit of Jimi Hendrix live in the song as well. He manages to get this epic adventure into three and a half, four minutes. To me it just embodies Hendrix: rebellious but friendly, and totally in control of the universe. He's like a shamanistic character isn't he? 'Up From The Skies' is really amusing, really cool. 'Spanish Castle Magic' is just a rocker. But it's got this real sparkle to the whole thing. I think these albums, the reason why they've lasted, is because you can listen to them at any time. You can have them for breakfast, lunch or dinner. You can listen to Axis: Bold As Love on an epic road trip or having a coffee in the morning."

"Romeo and Juliet is on my list because I saw it when I was at a very formative age. I think I was 14 or 15, and at that age, girls are very dramatic about romance and they’re just starting to get those feelings, and love is very painful and very important. It’s overwhelming and you have these huge crushes, and so Romeo and Juliet is all about that huge first love. And you couldn’t have found two more beautiful teenagers than Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting… and that was the first time I had ever seen Michael York and he was stunning — he was stunning. The costumes were gorgeous. Zeffirelli was a beautiful artist. He designed theater and opera and sets, so it was just beautiful. I think why I love Italy so much now is because of that movie, and it made me fall in love with Shakespeare. That’s one of the first times that Shakespeare became not just some dusty old English thing that you had to study in school, but it became really alive. You know what else did that really well? Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet… So, Romeo and Juliet was my first introduction. I walked around pretending I was Olivia Hussey. I had my long dark hair parted in the middle, and we had these, like, hippie baby-doll blouses that had the empire waist, so I would wear that all the time and I’d sorta stare at myself in the mirror. Of course, there was nobody in Cleveland, OH who looked anything like Leonard Whiting, so it was all in my head."

"I'm so excited about being on the same bill as Patti Smith at Field Day! I think it's going to be fucking brilliant as well. I think she's going to be amazing. You can sometimes be disappointed because of all the baggage and preconceptions that an artist can bring from back in the day but I think she'll be a killer. She's going to be all over it and I'm really excited. But yeah, this album was a massive mainstay in our tour bus and throughout our working life and it still is now. I always wanted our band to sound like Patti Smith Group - they've got the piano, they've got the hard and fast edgy guitar, the bass… that's how I wanted Supergrass to sound like. How close did we come to achieving that? Well, there were the odd songs where we had that energy where Danny [Goffey] was on drums and keeping quite simple 4/4 beats and punky beats but without having screaming and distorted guitars all over the place. We had those moments of guitar, bass, piano and drums and we had that energy. I mean, can you imagine Sex Pistols with a piano? And that's what Patti Smith Group did so brilliantly - they had that raw energy. They had that piano but it wasn't used in that flowery way. It's a bit like how Bowie used piano in that rhythmic way. This record is an utter classic. That moment in 'Horses' where it all kicks off, I think we've searched to write our own version of that over the years. It's like, 'Woah! Take me away!'"

"Fuck, I was so excited when I heard this song. I was staying up late one night - I can’t remember what radio show I was listening to, it was a radio that would play new songs - and I taped it off the radio. It was just so fucking cool, [sings “Dy-Na-Mi-Tee”]. I think that was the first song I heard where I thought ‘I could write a song.’ “After that I did my first ever performance in public. I’d done a school performance before that, but I did a performance with a garage MC who asked me to sing and I was ‘Lady K’ [laughs]. I sang in Croydon at a pub or something and I was doing the garage thing for a bit. That was the biggest music scene at that time in the UK, pirate radio was bigger than normal radio. I would go clubbing in Watford, I would grind in the clubs and I would get CDs from the DJs there who would have all new stuff. “That sort of reminds me of punk in a way, it was just kids in their bedrooms and they were running the clubs. I felt Ms. Dynamite did something really meaningful and she felt like a political artist to me. I don’t think I knew that at the time, but I think that’s why I was drawn in by her. I was looking at lyrics in a different way then too, thinking about the world a lot and wanting to help the world, maybe being political and not realising it. I wanted to write about the fucked up shit in the world."