"Now I’m in New York, in a band with Chris Frantz and his girlfriend, Tina [Weymouth], and we didn’t have a super-duper plan. I had ambitions to be a fine artist and show in galleries, but I was also writing songs. This club, CBGB, had opened around the corner, and there were bands like Television playing, and Patti Smith was doing poetry readings. We thought, If we learn some songs, we can play there. I had a day job as what was called a “stat man” for a company that designed Revlon counter displays. So I worked in a little dark room in the middle of this office—which meant I had a little radio in there, and I could listen to music. And nobody else would bother me. Bowie was on the radio a little bit, and he was a huge influence for a lot of people. I was aware of all the Ziggy Stardust stuff, and then him moving onto the Berlin stuff. Somewhere around this time, in the late ’70s, after we made our first record, we met Brian Eno, who had worked with him on Low, and that was very cool for us. In 1980, I went with Toni Basil to see Bowie in The Elephant Man. He was reading the collected speeches of Fidel Castro at the time, and he gave me the book and said, “You might enjoy this.” I dutifully read it. Castro could really ramble on. Really ramble on."

"I saw Talking Heads as a kid at Birmingham Barbarella’s. They were about to release Talking Heads: 77. They were quirky and I didn’t know so much about them but they were out of New York, so it was interesting. Anything out of New York I would just buy, whether it was Richard Hell And The Voidoids, Patti Smith, the CBGB scene or Blondie. I loved Blondie and think they are one of the most underrated bands ever – so many great songs, the irony of the lyrics and Debbie’s voice and style. I put Talking Heads in because I think their sense and appetite for experimentation is pretty extraordinary. All of their records have got something on them which was so original. I love the Fear Of Music album but I think the masterpiece is Remain In Light which I suspect Brian Eno had a rather large hand in. Either way, that Byrne-Eno combination worked brilliantly together. The album had the surprise hit single on it – ‘Once In A Lifetime’ – and that again was so unique and had that quirky sense of humour in the video. David Byrne really captured an aspect of America that nobody else did. To me, Talking Heads were the great American band of the eighties. There were lots of other bands that were good – The Cars wrote some great songs – but Talking Heads’ use of percussion, their use of African music and Byrne’s lyrics were so special. For me, he is one of the best lyricists out there."

"I hate saying this, but it did what it said on the sleeve! It was them two and it was a lot of drums. It was one of the first records I would listen to because a lot of jazz drumming is very difficult and complicated, if you listen to somebody like Buddy Rich you can't help but think how does he do that; what is he doing? How do you do that? It's very complex which always scared me off. Kenny Clare and Ronnie Stephenson had that same technical proficiency but they didn't use it the same way. They were much more in the mould of Gene Krupa. The parts that they'd play were very musical. I don't know if they were musical to people who weren't drummers, but to me it all made sense. Some of the stuff they did was almost melodic, like patterns on the toms and breaks, and then just trading off each other, which I thought was pretty cool because it was like hearing two people being inspired. Again that was something that really came in with The Damned, with Brian and me. It was almost like a competition sometimes: he would play something and then I would go okay, if you're going to do that then I'm going to do this. And I think that probably came to us from listening to these drum battles and taking on the mentality of that; feeding on what's going on around you, regardless of what it is."