"I produced this track, so that’s one of the reasons why I put it in here and “The Cutter” was one of those songs that meant a lot to me, because they were my mates. We’d all talked about being in bands and we’d all been in bands together - even though half of them had never had a rehearsal! When Echo & The Bunnymen actually did rehearse, you could instantly see the chemistry from the very start. There was just three of them with a drum machine at first, but right from the start it was very special. I was shocked actually, I remember being shocked at how good it was. I’d never produced a record and I had no ambition to be a producer, so it was a real surprise when they asked me to produce a track. “The Cutter” was the breakthrough track, we’d done “The Back Of Love” which had made it to Top Of The Pops and was in the top twenty, but “The Cutter” took it to another level. When I worked with them it was a bit different because they were my mates, so I almost joined the band really. I played a bit of guitar and put in the middle-eights with Ian. I feel like a lot of myself went into that tune, and when it became a hit for them it was a really big moment. I think it made me feel like I could do something, I didn’t know what, but it made me feel like I could."

"A dirty sexy rock & roll track from the future: that was my concept of it when I first heard it. At the time when he wrote it, it sounded pretty far out from anything he had written before. So, the challenge was finding an approach that would fit with the other songs we'd be doing. He'd write on a 12-string guitar mainly, so it always had a little bit of a folky element to it. It would sound like it came from a folk singer, but we knew it wasn't going to come out like a folk song so we would have to figure out how to break it down into a rock & roll context. Those are the things that would go through our heads as a band, and that one was, lyrically, summing up the whole Ziggy thing. You know: 'I'm an alien' and just the atmosphere around it. And when Mick Ronson did his solo on it, that was a new kind of solo. I think he used an echoplex thing, where it sort of went round on a tape machine and kept going and going and then he played on top of it – and it was pretty freaky! Pretty far out to play along with! The whole thing sounded as big as the universe while you were playing, but you had to keep grounded, keep that solid beat going and not be affected. Then when we heard it back it was like 'wow!' It went to the stars, but we still had our feet on the ground."

"Around 1983 or '84, pop music stopped doing it for me. It was getting a bit clean. There was still a lot of good stuff, but I think it was The Smiths... I wasn't obsessed with them the way Sice was and a few other people I knew, but listening to them made you want to find something else. Then, when The Jesus And Mary Chain came out that was it. My brother brought their second single home and I wasn't sure at first. It was such a racket. It still is. But it was 'You Trip Me Up' that really did it for me - I was sold. This beautiful marriage of... it's not nice feedback, controlled feedback like you'd get off The Who. It's awful. But the core of what's going on - the song - is so lovely. And they looked fantastic, like The Beatles in Hamburg. They looked like a gang. It just seemed like they were blowing everything away and starting again. I went to listen to the Velvets after I'd heard this, and the Velvets did it... it was either noise or it was a great melody. They never really did the two together, whereas the Mary Chain managed to marry the two. The video is just fantastic. They're walking around somewhere in the Mediterranean, sitting on the beach in full leather gear with their massive guitars. After hearing the Mary Chain, that was all I wanted to listen to - bands who did that. They were a big band. They were in Smash Hits, which is hard to believe."