"I just saw Nik Turner on Sunday night. He’s doing good. We have a strange history with him and Hawkwind. In 1971, in COUM Transmissions, we somehow managed to con this benefit concert for a commune that had been busted for drugs that Hawkwind were headlining, and got the second slot on the bill. None of us had ever played anything, except me on drums, and it was the era when everyone was trying to have the biggest drum kit, so we borrowed drum kits from some of the other bands involved. We got a dwarf on guitar who’d never even seen a guitar before. We had someone from Bridlington on a surfboard on a bucket of water as the vocalist, who just told jokes because he was actually a comedian. Cosey was dressed as an English schoolgirl with a starting pistol, firing in the air, and her own whips. Nik Turner and Lemmy and everyone remember Cosey! Then in ‘92 or ‘93, Hawkwind came to tour the West Coast, and Nik called me up and asked if I wanted to play keyboards for Hawkwind. I said “of course!”. We got to San Francisco and Jello Biafra was there and he came running into my dressing room and said, “Gen! I love Hawkwind!” I thought he was kidding, but he was serious and said it was his dream to sing ‘Silver Machine’ with Hawkwind. So we got him to join in on backing vocals on ‘Silver Machine’. He was thrilled."

"It's got all the classics on it: 'Good Golly Miss Molly', 'Rip It Up'. It's tremendous, when you put that thing on: from start to finish, it's boom all the way! First of all, I thought he was a girl, because I heard him do 'Rip It Up' and I'd heard Bill Haley & The Comets - they covered a lot of things where we didn't know what the originals were at first, but then you'd hear them - sometimes in movie houses funnily enough, like in Pontypridd, between films, they would play records. Sometimes they'd play the original American ones, but that's when I heard 'Rip It Up' by Little Richard. I thought, 'Some chick has covered Billy Haley & The Comets', but it was the original record. And then the same thing with 'Ain't That A Shame' - I heard the Pat Boon version before I heard Fats Domino. We never got to them that early - there was always somebody covering them first, getting the jump on it. It definitely made me appreciate the songs more when I first heard it, no doubt about it. Americans - they're paranoid about the lyrics that might be a little risque. With Big Joe Turner, on his version of 'Shake Rattle and Roll', there's some - 'you're wearing those dresses, the sun comes shining through / I can't believe my eyes, all that mess belongs to you' - [laughs] well, they cut that back out straightaway! Bill Haley & The Comets: 'Wearin' those dresses, your hair done up so nice / you look so warm, but your heart is cold as ice' - they changed it"