"When I was about 15, Danny and Mick [Quinn, Supergrass bassist] lived in this row of cottages that was literally 10 metres from my family house. That was our base; we’d get together in Mick’s living room. I feel very lucky to have been in a band at that time because we were still approaching music – playing live, writing and recording – the way they had since the beginning; it was the last little window where there was only two-inch tape recording, just a few A&R men around who would come to gigs and stuff, no internet, mobile phones. It seems weird now! We were in the house getting stoned and playing loads of records, everything from Pink Floyd to Gong, Muppets albums, Zappa and Patti Smith. A big one for us was Brian Eno’s Here Come The Warm Jets – it was one we were really hooked on. For somebody so experimental he had killer melodies and the way he double-tracked his voice is just really cool. The production and instrumentation are kind of understated and hint at lo-fi, but in an honest way. We had a meeting with him in New York in the early 00s about producing us. I don’t think it was anything creative that was the issue, it was a boring calendar thing from what I remember, but it was great to meet him and have a chat."

"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."

"Ziggy was like the entry level for me. I wasn't aware when I bought it that I was buying a concept album about a constructed creature called Ziggy Stardust. I just thought David Bowie WAS Ziggy Stardust. I must have been 12 or 13. I had a friend at school called Peter May who I sat next to, and we were both totally into the same things, like David and Marc. We both bought acoustic guitars and we'd have jamming sessions on Sunday nights at his parent's house, and I would learn the songs of both of them. It really sparked my imagination, and for a whole generation of people, Angie and David were the It couple for us. Forget about Mick [Jagger] and Bianca - that held no interest for me whatsoever, compared to Angie & David's glittering bisexual glamour. That was all a big part of it too, and that - for me - was when sexuality entered into it and I heard the word 'bisexual'. I'd heard the word 'queer' - but I'd never heard the word 'bisexual' or even an artist claiming they were. That was a huge moment for me. From Ziggy onwards, there was no looking back after that. I played truant from school to queue up to get tickets for that final tour of the Spiders, and Aladdin Sane was out by then, and I went to see him at the Liverpool Empire and it was mindblowing. And you know, Ian McCulloch, Marc Almond, Pete Burns - a whole generation of people who were to be the next wave were all there. It was an incredible world of glamour. I know they call it glam rock, but to me that was Sweet. David and Bryan [Ferry] - they were artists."

"I would say that David Bowie had the biggest single influence on all music that came out of the time period when I started at the beginning of the 1980s. And all other bands in that modern music zone were influenced most by David Bowie. Throughout the seventies we could safely say that he pretty much owned it. If The Beatles owned the sixties, Bowie owned the seventies. I could have picked any one of his albums. I thought about Hunky Dory which I have played most, or Ziggy Stardust... which was the first album I ever bought. I thought about Station To Station which changed things as his influences morphed and then the whole Berlin trilogy which were extraordinary records. I decided on Aladdin Sane as I think it is the ultimate glam album. Musically, it was fuelled with seventies energy. Mick Ronson’s guitar work is spectacular, the tracks all have an anxiety to them – songs like ‘Cracked Actor’ and ‘Panic In Detroit’ really had an edginess. The singles ‘The Jean Genie’ and ‘Drive-In Saturday’ were probably not even the best tracks on the album – ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ is my favourite track on the album – but had an attitude. You could taste the air they were recorded in. It was the album that turned Bowie into an absolute superstar worldwide. I played it a lot when I was a kid and it was one of those records that made me want to be in a band. Also, it’s by far the greatest cover of the 1970s. The image of the flash across Bowie’s face really resonates. It’s held up – I see that the V&A museum are having a big show of Bowie’s career and memorabilia (and so they should) and the image they are using to advertise it is the front cover of Aladdin Sane."

"Foreigner was a band that had an anthemic sophistication about their musical approach. It was educated, well-formed, well turned-out British-American music. The primary songwriter and leader of the band [Mick Jones] was a Brit, and the vocal talents of probably rock’s finest ever tenor, Lou Gramm, fitted perfectly with their sound. I got to know Lou many years later after his horrendous illness. When he was making his comeback to singing after brain surgery, me and some other guys played with him on a big German TV show, and we had to change the key of the song we were doing. We dropped it before he came over to Germany and then when he got there we dropped it another couple of steps. I said to him that the Lou Gramm of 20 or 30 years prior, when he was singing at the top of his range, was a pretty hard act to follow. He said that he didn’t write the songs, and just had to sing what was written, and that he could do that in the studio but it was very tough to do night after night on stage. In a sense I have been there myself. I made records in 1982 [The Broadsword And The Beast] and 1984 [Under Wraps] where I sang really well on record, absolutely at the top of my range. I’m a baritone, and my range is usually up to an E or an occasional hasty F, and then I was singing F# and G. I was singing at the top of my range and singing consistently up there, not just the occasional high note. It was something I couldn’t keep up night after night and I lost my voice in 1984 and had to pretty much take a year off to recover. I cancelled three shows in Australia and two shows in the USA. Over the period of a month I cancelled more than 50 per cent of all the shows that I’ve cancelled in my entire 44 years in music. I still have a soft spot for Lou because of his incredible vocal ability and the wonderful controlled quality of his voice. I do believe he is rock’s finest tenor. His diction was good, his articulation and rhythm was great, he was a truly great singer. It doesn’t mean he’s rock’s best singer or best-known singer, because the usually out of tune Rod Stewart and gymnastic Robert Plant were probably more charismatic. Lou was more mainstream, but it was nevertheless a joy to listen to someone, rather like Alfie Boe, who is in complete control of their vocal ability as the result of hard work and a huge amount of natural talent. He may not be the most exciting pop singer, but for me he is the best."