"I want to write a book on the history of miming to music on TV. No, I don't, but I want to read it. I’m often surprised at how early the convention of miming to music on TV was subverted. From Ringo riding an exercise bike instead of drums on ‘I Feel Fine’ to the Faces playing football, it seems to be a wink to the camera that’s way ahead of anything else you would see at the time. The Thompson Twins seemed to be the first band solely designed to extend this joke. As a 12-year-old, I was fascinated by the fact I couldn't hear any of the instruments they were playing. They would stand behind guitars, congas and double basses but all you could hear were Prophet 5s and Emulators. I knew it was done as some kind of statement that I couldn’t fathom. These were artists, like the ones who Tony Hancock meets in The Rebel; proper oddball, hat-wearing pranksters. The backs of all the 12-inch singles from Into The Gap joined together to make a map of an island that was in the shape of the members' heads. The cassette version had an hour of alternative versions and mixes. They were a treasure trove for a geeky obsessed fan; they paid so much attention to detail. I now see their endless mixes and alternate versions of songs as a gateway into dub music; the idea that things could be transformed as much by subtracting things as adding them."

"I have a weird relationship with David Bowie. There's a part of me that didn't want to include him out of bloody-mindedness, not out of any disrespect to him but because I get sick of talking about David Bowie, what with all those comparisons we drew. People said that Suede were like a mixture of The Smiths and Bowie, when actually there are all these other comparisons that could have been made. But I can't get away from the fact that he is a huge influence on what I do, and you can't get away from the fact that he simply is one of the greatest artists of all time and he made some of the greatest music of the 1970s, and six or seven unbelievably good records. Low is just one of them, I could have chosen Hunky Dory, Space Oddity, Scary Monsters, Young Americans. But I've chosen Low because I love the mystery of it, even though it's not his best song album - there's no 'Quicksand' or anything like that. You can tell that he's shifting, and looking for something else. My favourite track on it is 'Warszawa', with its amazing Wagnerian stirring in the music. Suede's 'Europe Is Our Playground' had a sense that it was a version of that. I love the way Low doesn't explain itself, and that it's a really odd record. I love the chronology of it, the fact that three of my favourite records ever were all made around the same time: Low, Never Mind The Bollocks and Music For Airports."