"In 1962/3 German promoters Fritz Rau and Horst Lippmann booked a number of American blues and jazz artists to come over to tour Europe [The American Folk Blues Festival]. It was kind of the first time these blues musicians weren’t playing places like the south side of Chicago for $25 a night. They were playing in Europe’s finest concert halls to an audience that listened spellbound to every nuance and every word of a language they didn’t understand, from a people whose colour they didn’t understand and whose musical history they didn’t understand. They were enraptured by the emotion and individuality of these different blues musicians. So as a 16-year-old I went to the Manchester Free Trade Hall to see one of these shows, and one of the characters who stood out for me was J.B. Lenoir. He was alone on stage with an acoustic guitar and sang songs in this amazing bell-like high tenor that was quite unlike most of his compatriots, and he made a great impact on me. In the same year I heard him singing ‘Alabama Blues’ and was later given by Rau an album they recorded with Lenoir of the same name, repackaged and remarketed today as Passionate Blues. ‘Alabama Blues’ was the album’s key track, a very brave song for a black man to sing in 1963, with the race riots, lynch mobs, bombs and brutality. Almost the only clarion voice of protest and political awareness I was aware of was J.B. Lenoir. He sang about Vietnam, he sang about the wars in the street, he sang about police and the lynch mobs, and he did so in a very articulate and responsible way – he wasn’t a rabble-rouser. He reflected what was going on and how it impacted on him and his life, if not in an uncomplaining way, certainly not in a vitriolic way. When we think about it these are perfect sentiments for the blues. I heard some really rather tiresome man on breakfast television this morning, Michael Buble I think it was, talking about his latest single. He took great pains to explain how it was about the break-up of a relationship and said, “all my songs are about being in love or out of love, that’s what I do.” I thought to myself: “How incredibly interesting. Not.” How incredibly dull and boring, but it’s the stuff of so much. Shakespeare’s sonnets probably should have got it out of the system for planet earth and its population for all time. I don’t have a problem with a good love song but very few of them are, they’re really incredibly trite and employ the same tiresome, limiting vocabulary and expressions. It’s almost as if people’s brains can only go as far as their gonads. J.B. Lenoir proved that you can be passionate about the lynchings in Alabama. That’s the stuff we need to know about and blues, simple and direct and emotionless as it is, is the perfect form for that."

"I think of all these three artists - Bolan, Bowie and Iggy - together and what I said about ‘The Jean Genie’ is all in there on the cover of Raw Power. Again, it’s illicit, threatening and very alluring to a certain kind of teenager looking for excitement, and in my case that was always through music and music culture. “I got Raw Power when I was fourteen because it was referred to me by Billy Duffy from The Cult, who would have been all of sixteen at the time. It was at a time when I was starting to recognise I had my own thing as a guitar player that my mates didn’t have, I’m not saying it was better, I just knew I was developing my own style. “Billy heard me playing a riff I was writing and said ‘That’s ‘Gimme Danger’ right?’ I said I’d never heard of ‘Gimme Danger and Billy said ‘That sounds like James Williamson.’ So I immediately had my back up, I was ‘Who’s this James Williamson kid? This is my new song, what are you talking about?’ But I knew Billy knew his stuff and that I really had to seek this record out, because Billy was sure that’s what I was playing and it was my new song. “I went into Virgin Records that weekend and I was stunned by the cover. It was Iggy bare-chested, looking like an iguana or a lizard and it was onstage as well, it was something that was really happening, not some photoshoot. I bought the LP for about £2.30, got it home and played ‘Search and Destroy.’ I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing, the sound of the vocal and this distorted band and when it got to ‘Gimme Danger’ it was really mysterious, dark and moody. “I couldn’t believe it was exactly the same, the intro sounded exactly like what I was trying to do and what I was quite close to. That could have been really dispiriting or disheartening, but it had the opposite effect - it was really galvanising. There was a lot of Prog at the time but with this there weren’t these silly organ solos, it was just ‘done.’ I didn’t need it to go on for eight minutes, it was really hip and it shone a light for me. I’ve always used this album as a yardstick. “‘Gimme Danger’ was uncanny, it was the way I was starting to play the guitar and if you listen to the start I think it sounds like what people think I sound like. I’ve met James Williamson and he knows all about this thing that happened to me and it was great to be able to tell him, he was very surprised, pleased and gracious about it and that made a massive difference. I’ve been very fortunate to have that happen to me a couple of times, where people have talked about a riff I’ve done and how they tried to work it out. So I know what it means and it’s amazing, I don’t mean that to sound immodest, it’s just an amazing thing."

"Whitney Houston, what a phenomenon! Now that she’s gone even more so, I think maybe the world just didn’t recognise what we had. Maybe in the 80s and 90s people understood, ‘cause she was just this shining star. When I watch her performances – there’s one in particular, where she’s singing to the sailors that’ve come back – and she sings “All The Man That I Need”, I just think it’s the most perfect performance I’ve ever seen! I can’t believe it’s live! “'My Love Is Your Love' is probably one of my favourite songs ever. I heard it once on the radio – I must have been 12 when it came out – and I fell in love with it instantly: the voice, the track, the production. My parents and I went camping in the Lake District, and I went to Woolies and found the CD. I was so excited, but we didn’t have a CD player! ""For a whole week of camping, I remember staring at this CD with the memory of how incredible it was on the radio from one listen, and the excitement of ‘I can’t wait to get back! We have to drive nine hours to get back! We have to finish the camping trip!’ Getting home, I just ran to the CD player to listen to it! ""I love the accessibility of music through streaming, and now everyone everywhere can listen, which I think is a wonderful thing. The one thing I do miss is the anticipation of music, and the listener having to make more of an effort to hear it. For me, the appreciation was more. When you’re a kid, you don’t really have money to spend on anything, so you were investing everything you had on this feeling. I always think back to that every time someone asks me about streaming. I want that feeling back, of really having to make a physical effort to listen. I just remember cherishing music in such a different way. ""It’s a hard one to balance. It is great that we can all hear everything we want all the time, but for me as an avid music lover, I feel a difference. If there’s something I really love, or an artist I really appreciate, I will always make sure I go and buy the vinyl. I’m really excited about my next album – I’ve been told they’re going to make cassettes of it! Just for nostalgia’s sake, I think that’s so exciting! Beyond the physical aspect to listen to it is the maintenance of it. You have to keep your CDs safe; you can’t scratch them! You have to be careful when you rewind the tape! That care is all part of the experience. ""Every artist that I’ve fallen in love with has been because I’ve been able to see all sides of them, and some sides of artists aren’t going to be as popular or as streamable as others! I think it’s important to have a full sense of who someone is. For the artist, to have the anchor of an album is quite stabilising: if you’re thinking in singles that can get quite confusing and go in so many different directions"