"I was 16 or 17. I'd just started doing Art A Level at school, and this whole world suddenly just opened up. For ages, I'd been playing the flute, playing the saxophone and skateboarding. That was it really and then all of a sudden, I hit that age. My friend Adrian had a ridiculous record collection. He started making tapes for us, me and another friend of mine, and he introduced us to all that stuff: The Doors, The Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix. I was getting really into art and really into poetry. I discovered Picasso, Matisse, Magritte at the same time. I also discovered surrealism and surrealist poetry, literally in the same couple of years. It was like an explosion in my head. 
'Run Run Run' was just brilliant because it was so chaotic. I'd been into music for a while - I was really into The Police and various bits - but this was just so different. I just loved how nihilistic it was. Really dirty. Luckily my partner's a massive Velvet Underground fan as well, so we stick it on quite often, even now. I still get the same feeling from it when I listen to it now that I did that very first time. I still get that electric charge of energy from it."

"I was listening to this a lot when Supergrass were making Diamond Hoo Ha over in Berlin. This was the record of that album for me and I was listening to it over and over again. I love the rawness and the vocal performances. When I first heard it, it was unlike anything I'd ever heard before. It was different and I love Tom Verlaine's vocal quality; it's really androgynous and like the male Patti Smith. It had that delivery and I love it. I've never been drawn into the alternate tunings that they used and so I've never delved into that. I'm probably not enough of a nerd about other people's music to do that. But their playing is never pompous or self-indulgent. It wasn't guitar duelling but Television are very sensitive to their instruments. Everything had its place but I think I was drawn to it because of the band I was in. This was what we aspired to in terms of Mick [Quinn] being a brilliant bass player so we let him speak with what he was doing. And you couldn't tread over Danny because he had these amazing bass fills and we had that internal dialogue where everybody got to speak. The best bands are the ones that connect that way and are really on fire when there's that understanding between each other."

"This is the title track from New Values which is my favourite album of his. I don’t know if that’s because with songs like ‘Lust For Life’ and ‘The Passenger’ - and they’re amazing songs - I just heard them so much when I was in a young band and they were used everywhere. “I hooked onto New Values at some point at the end of the ‘90s, just looking through Iggy’s stuff and back catalogue and then talking to Mick and Danny. When you’re in a band you talk about the albums you’re into, one of us got the others into it and we all kind of agreed ‘Yeah, that’s the album.’ “The backing band and the backing vocals sound so good on this, it’s two or three guys in the band delivering these not shouty backing vocals, it’s just such a great sounding album and the band is really on it. It’s quite a dry sounding album, all the drums are very dry and it’s a very dry record to listen to but it’s got some great moments on the whole record. ‘I’m Bored’ is an utter classic as well, but ‘New Values’ is great, it’s got a really cool beat, the way the drums are and Iggy’s delivery is brilliant. It doesn’t scream at you, which I think is cool, it’s got a poise to it that I really like."

"I'd been into music for as long as I can remember, from being four years old. My dad bought me a record player when I was 11, and I went out and bought three albums: I had those Beatles double albums, the red and the blue, '62-'66 and '66-'70, I bought those, and I also bought Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones. That was the first Stones album that I bought. I actually wore it out, and parts of it became unplayable, even with halfpenny pieces on top of the stylus. For me, the Stones, when they pulled away from the Beatles' influence and became their own thing, it started with Beggars Banquet. It's those four albums - Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Exile and Sticky Fingers, I think are the greatest years of the Rolling Stones as an individual, this is what we do, we're not following the Beatles any more. And they did it with such glory that I could easily have chosen [another] one of those four albums for the same reason. Once again we seem to be talking about unsung heroes, one of the great things about those Stones albums is the brilliant engineering by Glyn Johns; I think Andy Johns was involved as well, but the engineering on those records is just awesome, awesome, awesome."