"I got that record from my brother-in-law for Christmas - we have this huge family and so we were picking names from a hat and whoever you got the name of you bought a present for. My brother-in-law was this cool fucking dude who listened to college radio and he got me that first Clash record and I got to see them later that year so I guess it was Christmas 1978. We had the US version, it was just called The Clash with the green cover – you knew that if you were American, 'cos we were like, ""we cant get the real fucking English version"" - I mean they had it on import, but it was so expensive. I don’t know what my musical life would have been like if I didn’t get to see that gig. It was really exotic for that band to come and play Seattle. The whole Seattle community was there and it was probably only 200 people but it felt like everybody in the world was there. I remember there was this wooden barrier and this security guy in front of the pit who didn’t know how to deal with a punk rock audience, and he just decked this kid and broke his nose and The Clash just stopped the gig. And Paul Simonon or someone grabbed an axe and broke down the barrier! And I remember Joe Strummer saying, ""there’s no difference between us and you guys, these barriers and shit are separating us"", and it suddenly dawned on me. They were totally against the whole rock star thing, like there’s not us and there’s you, it was like we were all in this together. I guess I’d be lying if I said in the nineties I didn’t have… not ‘punk rock guilt’ exactly, but there would be a lot of bands that came up, like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, there were guys who were in the punk rock scene and this was what was next, and as a young dude you feel a little guilty when you’re suddenly selling millions of records. But no-one sold their soul or changed their fucking tune, this was what evolved out of punk rock. Looking back it was a natural progression. Guns was a mix of a lot of different input, punk rock, seventies rock, and it was about doing something different and maybe that’s what punk rock sounded like at that point, I don’t know (laughs). I mean Guns was as DIY as it got, we would hitchhike 1,200 miles to get to a gig but we just went to the next level in getting a major label deal, that was the big change. But I took that ethic with me that Strummer had said. I don’t know any different, I’m honoured to be playing gigs and I’ve always paid tribute to that way of thinking."

"I'm a huge Patti Smith fan; if ever there was an artist who continues to inspire me through decade after decade, it would be Patti Smith. I really hold her in the highest of regard – a woman who has never compromised, has never sold herself for commerciality or success: I admire her so much for that. 

 I guess I picked Wave because my absolute favourite Patti Smith song is on that record: 'Revenge'. I could have easily picked Horses which I feel has been talked about a million times before but I always feel like Wave just doesn't really get quite the same love. 'Revenge' is just a song that I turn to over and over when I feel furious [laughs]. 'Kimberly' is on there too and I covered that with my middle band, Angelfish. 

 I [first discovered Smith] when I was in Goodbye Mr Mackenzie and the lead singer was always introducing me to amazing music. He said: ""I really think you should check out Patti Smith, I think you'd really love her,"" before giving me Horses. I took it home and played it on my old record player and just fell insanely in love. 

 I love the androgynous sound of her voice and her power. I'd always been looking for non-conforming female voices and she embodied it; I found it in her. 

 She's also never let me down. You know how you can fall in love with artists and sometimes they leave you out in the cold as their careers continue – they maybe decide to sell themselves cheap, or they fall by the wayside or they can't get their shit together. There's a million and one reasons why artists can let us down but I've never felt let down by her. She remains an incredible beacon for me and someone I always turn to – whether it's her music or her writing or her performances; she fills me with awe. 

 And you eventually got to perform on the same line up as her… 
 I had never seen Patti Smith perform until we shared a stage with her – she actually opened for Garbage. I was so embarrassed and so shocked that the music business was so ridiculous that we were top of the bill and Patti Smith was opening for us. It taught me a great lesson, actually, about what popular success is and what actually it means to be an artist with longevity. It was a humbling lesson and one which I was very aware of at the time and very embarrassed about. 

 She was, of course, as gracious as you would expect her to be. I got to meet her and I burst into tears [laughs]. But it was the first time I had ever seen her actually physically perform – that was the first time I'd ever seen her in the flesh. "

"The Associates were a huge band in Scotland; they certainly had some success in the rest of the world, but they were ours. Certainly when I was growing up I hadn't yet really discovered too many Scottish bands at that point – this was to change of course but these were one of the first I discovered. 
 
 The Associates struck me because I was aware that they were Scottish after I saw them on Top of the Pops and suddenly I made this connection between, 'Oh, you can be from Scotland, where there's no music industry, and be successful. You can get on Top of the Pops, you can be heard by an audience'. It was just a peculiar lesson and a sudden revelation for me of the possibilities that existed for musicians. 

 When you come from a country where back then there was no real established record industry, per se, they stood out. We had a couple of great record labels, you know, 53 & 3rd and Postcard Records and so on, but it was rare to get signed to those two labels, and they were still very small and independent; it was difficult to have the clout of a major London-based record label. 

 The Associates really captured my imagination. I loved them musically and I was really interested in their style. I was obsessed with the 'Gloomy Sunday' cover that Billy Mackenzie did. He had this extraordinary operatic voice; I'd never heard anything like in my life before. 

 I used to go to this club called the Hoochie Coochie Club in Edinburgh, which was big in the game for me, like I spent every weekend at this club. I was introduced to Billy Mackenzie and we really hit it off; I just was kind of obsessed by him. I just thought he was brilliant and really funny, irreverent, rebellious, and fascinating with the voice of an angel. He was so tortured and he had such a sad story in the end. 

 When I heard that he had taken his own life, I was so gutted: the whole of Scotland felt like they had lost a son. He had so much to give – he wasn't just sort of average, he wasn't an averagely successful musician: he was this extraordinary talent, a great interpreter and, again, a great communicator. He was able to make his own brilliant music but to also re-interpret classic songs that had been done by the greats and still he brought something of his own to that. 

 I think 'Gloomy Sunday' by The Associates is by far the greatest version of 'Gloomy Sunday' I've ever heard, and I've heard some amazing versions, like the one by by Sinéad O'Connor or Billie Holiday, but he brings something really special to that.
 
The Associates helped build Scotland's musical confidence to then start really exploring the music scene on its own terms, as opposed to going through London."

"I could have chosen any of the first three releases by Pixies – the Come On Pilgrim EP, Surfer Rosa or Doolittle. We bumped into Pixies when 'Sit Down' was number two in the charts. We were staying in the same hotel as them. I had seen them on TV and thought they were okay. I didn't get them totally but I thought they were pretty interesting. I went up to Black Francis at breakfast and introduced myself. We got talking for about half an hour and hit it off instantly. He invited me to a gig they were playing that night in London. I dragged two members of James, who had never heard of Pixies, to the show. We were up in the balcony chatting and not totally paying attention. I remember after about four songs, Saul [Davies] turning and saying, ""Have you been listening to this?"" He pushed us to the front of the balcony and we watched genius in front of our eyes. It was incredible – the arrangements, the vocals – Black Francis screams like no other singer – and beautiful subtlety within their post-punk songs. Pixies should have been as big as Nirvana, but never had a cute Kurt Cobain frontman. They were always one of the most ungainly-looking bands on the planet, but they made the most heavenly music as far as I was concerned. I love the surreal nature of the lyrics, that didn't quite make sense. I was a singer and I was all about making sense and communicating, and here was a band that seemed to do the opposite and the results were fantastic. That was quite revolutionary to me. Later, when we worked with Brian Eno on five albums, he would say to me ""stop making sense"" and I would think of the Talking Heads album of the same name, but I would also think of Pixies. With Pixies, not a large amount of people got them back then, as they were too ahead of their time. When Kurt Cobain said that in his perfect life he would have been born as the lead singer of Pixies, many people began to discover them. It meant that when they returned from their hiatus, they were bigger than they were previously as everyone had caught up to realise that Pixies were one of the most influential and important bands of all time. I got to know them a bit more and once went to see them play a tiny warm-up gig in London. I went backstage and was talking to Black Francis about screaming. I was asking how he did it, because when I tried, it wrecked my voice and I couldn't sing. He told me that a Puerto Rican man, who was a chef in a crappy restaurant in California, taught him how to scream. He then tried to teach me. At the time, he failed. I can scream a bit more now, but I think I was born more of a crooner."

"I mentioned Johnny's record store, and as well as Suicide, which is ironic considering he killed himself, he got me to listen to Nick Drake. This is such a perfect record, the songs are perfect, the singing's perfect, the instrumentation (even though Phil Collins plays on the songs) is perfect. It was one of those records that didn't need any explaining. I walked in, it was playing, and I asked 'what's this?', I thought it maybe was a Cat Stevens b-side. He told me it was Nick Drake and that I should buy it and he gave me a discount on the record because he was such an evangelist for it, and thought it was one of the best records ever made and that people needed to learn about Nick Drake. I took it home and fell in love with it. It's been a constant for me ever since. I can't imagine a month of my life that's gone by that I've not listened to it. The funniest experience was the first real tour I did, in 1991, with the band The Shamen. It was the first electronic music rave tour of the States, and at the time I didn't drink, I didn't do drugs, I was a very naive little kid and I was on tour with the Shamen, who were all really partying quite hard. I think we liked and respected each other, but we didn't really have anything in common apart from a shared love of electronic music. One day I was in the back of the lounge listening to Nick Drake's Bryter Layter and the singer came back and you could see his face lit up, and you could see he was a huge Nick Drake fan. We bonded over that. The next tour I did was with the Prodigy and Richie Hawtin, and the one after that was with Orbital and the Aphex Twin. During these tours there was a rave scene in the early 90s, but compared to the UK it was much smaller. It certainly existed. One of the reasons why the rave scene in the States is how it is, is because a lot of the people involved do way too many drugs. You get these DJs and performers who get really into the rave scene and then do more drugs in one night than most human beings should in a lifetime, so the burn-out rate is pretty high. In 1996 I was dating this raver girl, and she had gone out and did three hits of ecstasy, three hits of ketamine, some acid and crystal meth and I just remember thinking 'how can your body handle that?' But I guess if you're 19 years old it can handle it for a little while. Definitely that type of drug use led to a lot of people burning out"