"In my book this isn't a punk record - it's a fantastic rock album. I mean, it's produced by Chris Thomas for goodness sake. Cookie (Paul Cook) is a fantastic drummer: I know him because he plays in Phil Collen's other band, The Manraze Then you have Steve Jones - fucking amazing guitarist. Matlock had gone by this point, I think he was on 'Anarchy…' and Sid was on 'Bodies' but apart from that Jones did all of the guitar and all of the bass parts as well. And he probably did more overdubs on that than we did on bloody Pyromania - it took nine months to record. It's a real album: it represents punk, but in many ways it doesn't. The Pistols record is as planned out as a Genesis album. And that's why it works: it's fucking brilliant. Nobody snarls like Rotten: his 'we mean it, man' on 'God Save the Queen', it puts the hairs on my arm up to this day."

"First of all, I would say John Sayles’s Matewan. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it — and by the way, you should, because it’s a really incredible film — but it was one of those things where my Aunt Mary Jean from Knoxville, Tennessee sat me down and said, “You need to see this movie.” It’s by the same guy who did this other movie called Brother from Another Planet, but this movie’s really one of the best strike movies. It had James Earl Jones, Chris Cooper in his first movie, and Mary McDonnell. It’s got an incredible cast, but it’s just got a lot of soul. It’s really one of my favorite movies."

"I first met Chris Bear when I was fifteen. We were both at a jazz programme and he was the one person there that was frighteningly talented, just ridiculously talented, I was very intimidated by him. “He introduced me to this and it was one of the first records the two of us bonded over. I didn’t see him again for a few years, but this record was something I kept with me throughout the last few years of high school and I always remembered this amazing drummer who introduced me to it. “That first meeting with Chris Bear has been influential in my music and my life. We were all trying to be cool kids, trading on stuff that we knew and he had this record. There’s a wildness and a subtle funkiness to it, it’s functioning within the bounds of what the genre is but it’s pushing these tiny gradations of feeling. That’s what makes really good jazz really great, it sucks you into these funny little changes in the way that people are playing. It’s so human you feel like you’re in it, like you’re the person making it happen, it’s very physical. “The playing on this is incredibly fiery, Elvin Jones is a classic player and I think Chris Bear’s drumming comes a little bit from his playing at times, but this record is a little bit outside of pure jazz. I feel in our band, and in Chris Bear’s playing, he’s always had that subtlety of feeling, you can play within any one genre, but there’s this lightness of touch and a really subtle dynamic going on. “It takes knowing the right thing to find what’s good in jazz, it’s got a language and a history and it’s easy to hear terrible shit too, I get that. I remember riding around L.A in the back of someone’s car getting really stoned and listening to the whole record was like seeing colours, it was really intense and overwhelming"