"I remember hearing Johnny Appleseed and being like, ‘Yo! This is another level.’ It’s got like this Caribbean rhythm, acoustic guitars and simple harmonies, and him talking about everything from ’49 Buicks – which I knew everything about – to Martin Luther King tand even the old folklore of Johnny Appleseed. I really related to everything he was saying. When he asks in the song ‘Do you hear what I’m saying?’ I was like ‘Yeah dude, I do hear what you’re saying.’ There’s that question that he poses, too: ‘Is what was once true now no longer so?’ I still carry that line around with me today. That song shaped another facet of me as well, because it showed me that you could still play music with punk energy but you don’t have to play punk songs. It showed me that you could be political and social and talk about relationships or whatever, and still have the forcefulness of punk rock without playing aggressive music. And I don’t have no time to spike my hair up. That’s more show to me. At the time I was like, ‘I can only afford one shirt. Why the hell would I rip it up? If I rip it up and it rains then I’m gonna get wet.’ I’ve always tried to stay in that thing that it’s not about what you look like: it’s about what you do. You have to believe it and you have to mean it."

"That one was quite deep for me because again, growing up in church and being a believer; my family being from the West Indies - my mum’s side from Jamaica, my dad’s side from Dominica - I remember going to church and it was authentic West Indians there in their 40s, 50s that now live in the UK but have kept these traditions, they were singing these songs just without the drums. So when I first heard this, something just went - ‘Hang on?’ I remember being four and hearing this person sing that song but swap Selassie for this or that. It had that same spiritual element I was so used to, just in a very different form. It was like a weird full circle thing for me. It was almost like going back home. These drums are taking me somewhere, but also I'm being carried by these songs I know. It was beautiful to check out more of what Count Ossie was doing and people that were part of his band like Cedric Brooks. He was infusing a lot of the jazz elements that he's hearing from Coltrane or Ornette Coleman. That's deep, you’re deep in the heels of Kingston, aware of Ornette and them man. Like Duke Ellington had to come and visit him, you know, there’s a photo of him and Duke Ellington in the bush. You know he's got something that's important, not only important for culture but it's spiritually important for the Nyabinghi tradition. For me when I heard that record, particularly Grounation, where they’re going through loops for 20 minutes, it’s that thing again with soundsystems where you ‘wheel up a riddim’ or at church when the tune would just keep going. It was something I’d never heard but I also felt like it wasn’t foreign, those experiences are so wicked and that influenced the whole fascination with drum culture and drum languages, spirituality connected to drums, music orientated around the drums. I got into Batá and music for the Orishas and things that are all over the Diaspora in West Africa, the Caribbean, South America. And when you listen to it, the recording’s so rags but it just couldn't work if you put it in Abbey Road. It gave me a bit more confidence when I was doing my record that if I go to someone’s house and I show up with a handheld recorder, as long as it feels right it doesn't matter. Big studio, small studio, my phone as long as it’s got that feeling that I was going for."

"I believe this track had a lot of political resonance in the late ‘70s. I don’t know what the impact was at the time, because I was too young - I would’ve been about seven years old. It’s so articulate and compelling; it’s one of the most powerful pieces of lyricism to have come out of the twentieth century. “One of the biggest clichés that I despise is when guys who write lyrics for their band describe themselves as poets - it’s usually the most absurd affectation. With Linton Kwesi Johnson though, you have the opposite, a genuine poet who is putting his words to music. It’s really powerful sonically, too - Dennis Bovell’s production is astonishing and the record just really kicks. The words aren’t just believable, but completely empathetic. When he’s describing blows raining down on his friend and his reaction, it’s like you’re there with him. It’s like stepping into a movie or a really good book and watching the hero right in front of you. Very few songs pull that off as well as this one does. “I’d always listened to reggae growing up, but I didn’t hear this song until I was nineteen or twenty. I shared a flat, for a long time, with a guy from Ghana who was a big Linton Kwesi fan, and it was him who played me the record first. When I was growing up in the ‘80s, the Afro-Caribbean community in Britain didn’t really have much of a voice in the general media, so this record still felt relevant ten or fifteen years later when I finally heard it. “I was just talking to my sister the other day about the racism we saw going on at school. We went to the same one, this really ordinary comprehensive in Glasgow, she’s ten years younger than me and yet we saw similar things. It wasn’t even casual racism - it was often really active racism through which people identified themselves. There were school desks with NF scrawled on them, and some of the language that was thrown about was pretty appalling. It made this song all the more powerful when I first discovered it."