"If you listen to the first Saxon album, you can hear where the band was at that time, and what we were talking about earlier, with Free and Yes. That album is split three ways: the songs we wrote together that were fast and aggressive; then the more proggy tracks, longer and more musical; then blues riffs. So if you listen that album you can see there were three things that could have happened - we could have been like Free or like Yes, or we could play a new, aggressive kind of music, singing about motorcycles, and those were the songs we wrote together. If you listen to that album you could see where our influences came from, and how it all came together to create ‘Wheels Of Steel’. If you listen to ‘Backs To The Wall’, that is where I was coming from – try to get away from where you're supposed to be and drag yourself out of that to become a musician. ‘Stallions of the Highway’ is maybe the forerunner of ‘Motorcycle Man’ and the songs that Metallica and Megadeth took from and then invented a new kind of music"

"Photek is moody, it really got me. The title track 'Modus Operandi' was fucking good, the tension, then the first four tracks are really good. It reminded me of CCTV, it caught the atmosphere of this emerging new world coming out the ashes, this refined capitalism, the greed of Britpop at the end of the 90s when things were becoming more intense. Very claustrophobic. They kind of merge, this album and Red Snapper. I used to like getting absolutely walloped after a gig and putting it on, fucking yeah. I was in a sort of Terry Callier type act at the time. He's fucking brilliant - he died about four years ago. That stuff doesn't make the list because it didn't influence the structure of Sleafords really, the kind of music I wanted for it or the vocal. At that time, I only really listened to jungle or drum and bass at home. I was never into those nights, fuck that, no way, I wasn't interested. By that time bar culture had come along and I liked to sit around doing lots of sniff, you know. Sit around, soaking it all in, looking like a tit, you know."