"For me this is possibly the greatest rock album of all time. It's a band playing at the absolute, height of their power. It's very ambitious: it's got elements of ska and funk, pop songs, soul, jazz, rockabilly, reggae - and in the end it's got this really great blues energetic vibe. It just seems like they tossed it off and lyrically it touches on a lot of different subjects. Some of the songs are very political: 'Spanish Bombs' is about the Spanish civil war, 'London Calling' itself - that song is such an anthem. The band had some commercial success after this album - with Combat Rock - but to me London Calling is the pinnacle of their song-writing. It is just a fantastic record with an iconic sleeve; that shot of Paul Simonon smashing his bass, it's just incredible. I saw The Clash play in Chicago when I was on tour and it was like electricity. They came out and they started with 'London Calling'. The place was rammed with 5,000+ people and it went OFF! It was as if a bomb dropped and it was one of the most exciting concerts I've ever seen!"

"In those days it was all singles. Bands would put out an album with all the singles on so you’d already heard most of it. But this was the first album with great guitar riffs that repeated themselves – AC/DC and The Kinks are definitely related. It had a great guitar sound for the time: a great riff with a great melody on top is the essence of rock music for me; you can’t get away from it, that distorted guitar with the great riff. They weren’t as bluesy as some of the others – they didn’t go to the 12-bar blues all the time, like some bands did. Ray Davies’ lyrics always appealed to me because they were so straightforward – they were always about life. Probably at the time I didn’t notice, but later everyone looked at his work more as poetry."

"This was my album of 1974, although it came out in 1973. I guess I was always catching up with Frank Zappa. The first album by him that I bought was Hot Rats, and I found that a rather irritating album of not very evolved guitar playing. Frank was a bit of a one-trick pony as a guitarist, but as a musician, arranger and bandleader of the traditional sort, he was at the top of the tree, although he wasn’t unique as a bandleader. There were by then other bandleaders in rock, blues and soul groups like BB King, James Brown and in England John Mayall. In America, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart were bandleaders of an apparently tough-cookie nature, although everyone who worked with Frank seems to have revered him as a musician and a person."

"I wanted to mention this record because it’s almost taken for granted in David Bowie’s canon as just ‘there’s another great Bowie track’, yet it gets overlooked by something like ‘Let’s Dance’ or ‘Heroes.’ “If this came out now I don’t think it’d have any chance on mainstream radio and I think that’s because - and this might be incredibly subjective - he does this amazing thing where he manages to be completely remote whilst leading this band. It’s a really genius performance, the way he pitches his vocal and his persona, it’s cold and remote, but yet really sexy and it’s got no earnestness in it whatsoever. It’s not inciting you to get up and rock like ‘Jailhouse Rock’ or any of the Elvis Presley records, which is someone wanting to dance with you or encouraging you to do that. “To use an obvious comparison about Bowie, this has a really alien position because the voice is so cold, but it’s perfectly Rock and Roll. And it’s really white I think, probably because I can picture him in my mind when it came out and you’d never seen anyone more white, but it’s also as low down and Rock and Roll as any of the blues records that came out. It’s interesting, it’s got that sexuality in it. “I was about ten when it was released and to me and a bunch of kids experiencing it then it was so modern, because of what Bowie’s doing on top of what is essentially a Yardbirds or a Muddy Waters riff and using ‘The Jean Genie’, which back then was such a hip kind of slang. It’s a play on Jean Genet and he’s describing bits he’d picked up from Iggy, but in the early 70s’ everything was ‘Ziggy’, ‘Iggy’, ‘Genie’ and people were called ‘Mick’ and ‘Stevie.’ “There was a very urban, street Rock and Roll that was quite illicit; the threat of drugs, danger, confused sexuality and super-androgyny and the character he’s singing about personifies that in the mind, which leads me to Iggy."

"Led Zeppelin, goddamn! I don't think they made a bad record! There's that classic line from Cameron Crowe's movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High where they're cruising around, talking about how to get chicks. And the guy says: ""If you wanna score with a chick, turn out side two of volume four!"" I've used that a few times actually. It works [laughs]! Anyway if it didn't work, it was a nice soundtrack while it was going down. Jimmy Page is another guitar player that means a lot to me. Every member of that fucking band: John Paul Jones was an amazing writer, arranger and producer, as well as Jimmy. Plus John Bonham and Robert Plant... that's one of the greatest rock & roll bands of all times. It's just straight-up, fucking sexy, kick ass and shit, man! All the way from dirty low-down rock & roll to the biggest orchestral tracks like ‘Kashmir’. They travelled a lot of ground while keeping their roots intact, the blues. You know, certain bands really resonate in certain areas and that was one band that was always popular up there where I come from, the Northwest. You have at least ten fucking Zeppelin songs that you can jam with anybody at any time."