"McCarthy are indie icons of ours – we’ve covered at least three of their songs. They showed how you could fuse music and politics. They were one of the great protest bands but it was never the gurning, spittle-in-your-face confrontational stance that some bands take. There was always some kind of sarcasm in there that would cut its subject down to its knees, and this lyric is a perfect example of that. It talks to working-class disaffection and foreshadows New Labour’s obsession with gentrification and trying to drag people into the new culture with Wi-Fi and coffee houses everywhere: “Once there was class war/ But not any longer/ Because, baby, we are all bourgeois now.”"

"Color me gone, baby. I wouldn’t have seen this movie at twelve. I wouldn’t have understood anyone who didn’t have a mission, a point. But at nineteen, my face was gravel from “points.” I was ready for a whole lot of steel nothing, an empty road at high speeds, an existential needle guiding my arms. I knew little or nothing about automobiles, but I fell in love with this road trip, and made a couple myself, LA to Detroit, Tijuana to Spokane, no sleep, all little white pills and mud coffee. I never saw anyone as beautiful as James Taylor and Dennis Wilson passing me on the left, but I was ready to follow."