""This is by far the most important record for me. I heard it when I was 16. I was in a boarding school for boys, which was like a Victorian prison. One evening, I was told by the housemaster – who hated me – to take a phone call. It was my mum, who tells me that my dad was on the verge of dying and was having an operation that night. The operation may save him, but he is old and he might not wake up from the anaesthetic. I am told that I couldn't go home and that I just have to wait it out. At ten o'clock, the boarding school have 'lights out'. I am lying on my bed, in a state. I'm not going to be able to sleep, so I sneak through the corridors, down through the study to the one thing that redeems my life, which is the stereo system. Horses is there and I have no idea why I put it on. The first track I play ['Birdland'] is about a father dying, and a long, black funeral car and a boy standing watching. It is a nine-minute improvisational piece about Wilhelm Reich dying and his son, Peter, helping his father through the death process. This song shook me to the core, partly because it was improvised – it has no structure of verses or a chorus – and is just this rambling poem of desperation and longing. I think, from that moment on, I subconsciously knew I wanted to be a singer. I wanted to be somebody who could write a song that a boy or girl 5,000 miles away could hear and be moved so much that it would change his or her life. Therefore Horses became my template, probably by chance, because something so powerful happened to me on the night I first heard it. I then bought tickets to see her play and my parents banned me from going. I had to run away from home to go and see her show, and I was quite a good boy, so it was an unusual act for me. I had a couple of amazing things happen later in my life. Lenny Kaye, who had been a guitar player in her band, became the godfather to my eldest son. He also produced James' first record [Stutter]. Then, after Patti had been retired for a while, Lenny rang me from Detroit and told me that Patti was going to do her first gig in 15 years. He said that she might play for ten minutes or two hours. It was a wake as her husband and brother had just died. I flew to Detroit and I sat in front of her with about 150 people in a church, while she sang and read poetry, whilst crying, for three hours. It was her first gig in 15 years and afterwards I carried her guitar to the car and sat next to her and we talked. After that concert, I needed nothing more from Patti Smith. It had come the full circle of the apprentice sitting with his teacher. In fact, I did get more from her. She curated the Meltdown festival. She invited me to sing one night – it was a night of singing songs about lost children. I was the only man singing on that night. I sang with Tilda Swinton, Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses, Tori Amos, Sinéad O'Connor, Yoko Ono, Marianne Faithfull and Patti Smith. It was one of the most incredible musical nights of my life. I got to play with the great icons of the last 20 years – the women who have changed what it is like to be a woman in rock & roll on every level. It was a great honour and quite awe-inspiring. It completed the completion. No other album comes close to Horses. I became a singer three years later because of Horses. It is why I write songs that are naked and that wish to reach out and change people's lives, rather than any of the other million reasons people become singers."

"Another film is Apocalypse Now, which I’m sure every male moron you’ve ever interviewed has put in his top five. But the reason I put it in my top five is because Ian MacKaye, my best friend, and I went to go see it, first run, and we walked out not understanding what we had seen. But we walked home with, like, smoke coming out of our ears. And it’s one of those, where you’re young with no car, you get used to walking — like, “it’s only four miles each way.” And you’re so young and so stupid you just do it. Just getting snowed on. No problem. It was one of those massive walks back to our neighborhood and we just kinda walked home in shocked silence. We were, in a way, devastated, and neither one of us could tell you what that film was about. “Was it about the war?” “I guess.” So we went back to see it again later, and we were like 18 or 17. And maybe other 17-year-olds could’ve articulated it, but for Ian and I, we loved it but we were just kinda devastated by it. As I grew older, now I’m a twenty-something, and I’m watching once a year. And I start to understand it when I start to understand the Vietnam War differently. I’m starting to understand that conflict a little more as a young adult. Then I start reading into the characters more, and the more I see it, one day I feel like I’m Willard, Martin Sheen’s character. And one day I feel like I’m Kurtz, Brando’s character. And then I join Black Flag and our tours — our van was like PBR Street Gang. The highway was the Nung river. We would just go into these hairy situations. I’ll never forget one night, I’m in the back of our equipment truck with the backdoor kinda open, me and one of the roadies, and we’re looking at the lights of some harbor in Florida and I looked at him and said, “This sure enough is a bizarre sight in the middle of all this s—,” as Clean says when they’re going into that crazy kinda nightclub, DMZ area where Bill Graham comes out and does his amazing scene. And, Apocalypse Now lines from the film became patter between me and a Black Flag roadie, and then between members of the Rollins band, where we would speak in Apocalypse Now. When we’d go into a place where everything was screwed up I’d say, “Chris, did you find the monitor guy?” and he’d say, “No, there’s no f—ing CO here,” which is from Apocalypse Now, which means there’s nobody in charge; this place is a wreck. So, as I got older — I’m 55 now — that film is still relevant to me. And it still speaks to me on a lot of levels. Like when Kurtz says to Willard, “It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means… you must make a friend of horror.” And I never really understood that line until I was involved in a murder [the murder of Joe Cole], where I was almost killed and my friend was killed. I became full of horror. And once you get that, you get it. And so I’ll never think of that line the same way again, because it so describes what happened to me. I can’t describe what that was like to you. I can describe it but it’s gonna fall short. Unless that’s happened to you, you don’t understand what I’m telling you. You’ll only understand it in a journalistic way. Oh, right, OK, something bad happened. You don’t know the half of it, ’cause I can’t articulate it to you, and you can’t read me. And it’s what happened to all these dudes. These Vietnam vets, Iraq and Afghanistan. They come home and no one can read them. Which is shown so beautifully in The Hurt Locker. When the guy goes home and he’s preparing the meal with his wife, like yeah, “This guy got blown up.” And she’s like “Uh-Huh, cut the carrots.” There’s a complete disconnect. And so what Apocalypse Now — I finally figured it out — it’s just about insanity, which is nothing but what war is. It’s just a bunch of people being completely insane. And it captures the insanity of human conflict perfectly. It could’ve been any war."

"At the end of 1980, Glenn Branca had a tour booked so I quit my day job to go on it, so on the one level it was kind of this fulfillment – ‘wow I’m actually going to go on a fucking rock & roll tour, how great is this?’ And I think it was the end of me having day jobs in New York, which was kind of also an amazing thing to think about. The first tour was in the US and it was wrapped up in all this kind of weird stuff. We were on the West Coast when Lennon was shot. He was one of my great early heroes and one of the reasons why I was involved in any of this stuff to begin with, and he gets shot while I’m on my first rock & roll tour. It felt kind of heavy in a certain way. A few months later we went to Europe and when we played Berlin, Neubauten was the opening act and it was their second ever gig. So I got to see them at the very beginning and meet all those guys. Sheet metal music on cymbal stands - they were really just putting it together at that point, their music also progressed really fast in the early period, but this was just an early primitive version of what they were doing. I met all of those guys, Mufti and Blixa and Alexander and Alex and I some German relatives so I had an affinity with Germany to begin with, and we became friends right away, so I’ve known them since the early 80s, when they really started doing their thing it was this parallel rise to what Sonic Youth was doing. We came out of New York, out of the stuff that was coming out of New York and Black Flag and Minutemen the West Coast stuff, but at the same time all this stuff that was going on in England – the Birthday Party, was there at that point and we had met them, and in that same early period Lydia Lunch had taken us to one of the last Birthday Party shows in New York and we met Nick, Rowland (S. Howard), Mick Harvey and all those guys. Shortly after that when Sonic Youth first started coming to England, the Bad Seeds wanted Sonic Youth to be their opening act. Those early Neubauten records were just so impressive in what they were doing because again Blixa comes out of all this Germanic Berthold Brecht art music as well as this extreme stuff, and they took their extremism to welding torches and grinders on stage. It’s all music on a certain level, didn’t John Cage teach us that, or Stockhausen or Varèse? What Neubauten was doing was really coming out of this same climate of ‘we’ve got electric guitars on stage but we’ve also got noise-makers that could tie our music back to futurist music of the 20s’. I think the really dominant thing about all these groups from that period was that these were no longer kids that grew up in middle America that heard rock & roll and put a band together in their garage after high school and just went out and did their thing, these were all people that were arts educated and went to university and were steeped into 20th century art making practice whether it was music, or visual art or experimental theatre. For me I grew up with pop music on the radio in the kitchen of my house every morning before school, there was an AM radio blasting the latest 7” singles, you couldn’t get away from it, but at the same time I got educated in all this other stuff so all these people wanted to combine this stuff, they didn’t want to leave their education behind and pretend they were ruffians in the garage that were uneducated and idiots savants – kind of like the Stooges were a real version of that, although I couldn’t say enough about Iggy and his smartness. When Neubauten was doing that stuff it wasn’t tongue in cheek but it was marshalling a lot of different influences, not just simple pop influences. This is some of the most remarkable music ever, and the shows they put on, they were dangerous in an extreme way with sparks flying off the stage. Sonic Youth played this famous show in the Mojave Desert in 1984, and Neubauten did one in the same series, within 4 or 5 months of our show. We had a lot of early symbiotic relationships with all those groups."