"I got to love this album when I was 18, working in a second hand clothes shop in Glasgow, where one of the guys I worked with played it constantly. It was the first time I had heard music that felt like genuine contemporary protest music. The combination of Chuck D’s informed eloquence and unashamed confrontational stance was so potent. Here was a guy name-checking Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in the same breath as Coltrane and Anthrax. It was revolutionary in every sense. It felt dangerous. These guys had the FBI tapping their phones and were taking on the behemoth of the US establishment. While in retrospect the S1Ws may be the campest paramilitaries in history, the imagery of guerrilla conflict intensified the sense of resisting persecution. Like the best groups, it felt like a gang, too. Flav the joker, Chuck the boss, Terminator-X voiceless, but ever-present. Tight. Then there was the music. That fragmented repetition. Those bursts of brass and breakbeats, squealing like sirens against stolen guitars. Amazing. It didn’t sound like anything else. While Chuck D and his cartoon foil Flavor Flav had the lyrical articulacy, Terminator-X, Professor Griff and the Bomb Squad matched it musically. Their imagination was in context – how to take something from its original context, place it against something else out of context to create something way more powerful than either in isolation. In many ways, I still see this LP as the pinnacle of rap. Of course it is of its time and sonic trends advanced, but for sheer inventiveness and lyricism it has never been matched. It felt like rap was violently booting the world into a better direction – a brief flash of genius before it became mired in the vocabulary of egoism, misogyny and avarice. There have been great pinnacles since, but nothing matches this moment."

"Oh, this is brilliant! And the sound George Martin got on it! I love the opening drumbeat and the bleed with all the drums leaking onto the guitar mics and sometimes onto the vocals if they did the whole track live. The sound of it, to me, was real, raw excitement. They were a great group, they really were. From their days in Hamburg, they were so tight and on that record it really shows how brilliant they were. I think ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ was probably the greatest ever English rock’n’roll song. I would imagine that it’s a good as any old American rock’n’roll song, like the real thing. The real stuff. As good as a Chuck Berry tune or something. It was as solid as anything I’d ever heard or better. With the rock’n’roll records I’d started playing a bit by then – not bad, but a bit – and this song was nice and simple but don’t let that simplicity fool you. Some of the hardest stuff to do is the simple stuff, to make it effective and make it real and make it worthwhile. I thought it was unbelievable and I still do. Today, I still think, ""how the fuck did you do that""? It was like giving it back to the Americans: ""'ere y'are – we can do this as well!""