"I wasn’t really a punk. I was about 16 when that album came out. But I was living above Maples, a carpet shop near Tottenham Court Road, and it was right by Capital Radio, and I remember suddenly these 14-foot letters appeared in spraypaint on Capital‘s windows, ‘THE CLASH’! And there was a thing in Melody Maker, where I heard about this club called The Roxy at Covent Garden, so I went down there. Me and my friends already looked a bit skinhead-y, suedehead-y, and I had this mohair suit, but the connection was that the punks had straight trousers in this world of flares and Kevin Keegan hairdos. Nobody was wearing Vivienne Westwood clothing: there was a guy in a dinner jacket painted pink, and someone else in a boiler suit they’d made themselves, and it was really DIY. The tribalism between mods and skinheads and punks hadn’t really started at that time, and it hadn‘t fractured into a million pieces yet. In 1977, if you had short hair, and you were prepared to have someone call you a fucking cunt in your ear for it, you were in. I saw a band called Eater at the Roxy, whose average age I later found out was 14. And I first heard The Clash’s ‘1977’ and ‘White Riot’ on record there. I felt like I was at the advent of something new. I liked punk, and I liked the attitude, but by 1978 we had our own thing going. But I always had a soft spot for The Clash, because they had the reggae thing, like us, and there was a bit of soul in their music, for want of a better word. Joe Strummer definitely had a bit of soul in his voice. Every fucking track on that album’s brilliant, but my favourite’s ‘London’s Burning’. And they were fucking brilliant live. And we [2 Tone bands] wouldn’t have had anywhere to play if it wasn’t for punk. You had pub rock informing punk, and punk informing us, and The Specials were a direct amalgam of punk and ska, and we realised that the faster we played, the more likely we could get the crowd jumping up and down, which was a legacy of punk. All these different movements, fracturing then coming back together. You’d need 60,000 sociologists to untangle those couple of years."

"I came to Beefheart late. As a youngster, a lot of the older lads were into Beefheart but I didn’t like the way they dressed or their attitude I didn’t think they were cool. They were borderline radical hippies and I wasn’t having any of that. It didn’t look like fun to me. So I steered cleared of Beefheart. And then years later, somebody sat me down and played me Trout Mask Replica and I went, "oh my GOD!" and went out and bought everything. It was his use of language – he was writing like an abstract impressionist painter, fusing together chunks of English language that made more sense to me than something written straight. He was writing emotions through raw chunks of images that were coming to him. He was the first lyricist that made complete sense to me. Then I read that this music that I’d thought was badly played was in fact played amazingly well. He would write these very emotional piano pieces and then hand them to the guitarist who was the MD (musical director) and say, score that for the whole band to play. Often they weren’t even played to a rhythm – they were kinda random – and the band had to play along with them. They’re astonishing renditions of something that is so abstract that it needs great musicians to play them. He was fusing the blues and finding new ways of playing it. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) is one of his later albums where he returned to the style which people loved – trying to be less commercial than his Virgin Records years. There’s a track called ‘Tropical Hot Dog Night’, (quotes lyrics) “like two flamingos in a fruit fight… Everything’s wrong, at the same time it’s right… Like steppin’ out of a triangle into striped light” – and this reminded me of my drinking years. That’s exactly what it was like, where you’re in shadow and you’re in white light. This man knows exactly what’s going on in my head. He wrote such beautiful poetry. In later life, I made contact with him through Anton Corbijn and he’d send me music of his that wasn’t quite so well known. But I never got to meet him sadly. As a painter he was a massive influence on me because his titles were so fantastic. I take that same approach when I’m titling paintings for exhibition."

"I’m going to take us from otherworldly right back into the world itself, to my teenage years. I guess you could say this about nearly all of these songs, but this one in particular got me for the same reason that The Catcher in the Rye gets people, the idea of ‘us versus them’, the real, sincere people pitted against the phonies of the world. “As a teenager I could have written The Catcher in the Rye, nearly any teenager could. At some point you feel yourself isolated against this outside world and The Chameleons were a band, lyrically and musically, that kept ringing this same set of isolated chimes of the individual pitted against this hostile world. Heading into my teenage years I was like everyone, looking for someone that can say something better than you can until you can say it better than they can, and for a while The Chameleons could say it better in song than I could speak it myself. “With ‘Second Skin’ they had the lexicon and the guitars that I loved. It was a sort of musical version of The Catcher in the Rye, of someone trying to make sense of a very perplexing, and at times hostile world that I think all teenagers find themselves in and I was no exception. For some people it was punk rock and for others it was other elements of entertainment, but for me it had a lot to do with music and in The Chameleons I found a direct way of saying it and not in the blunt, abject anger that punk rock sometimes wielded. I didn’t feel it like that, mine was much more of a pointed knife than a blunt nightstick. “It’s even something that people say to us, that they grew up listening to Mercury Rev or Deserter’s Songs. When you’re writing, it’s coming out of you but sometimes you forget that for people who are listening to it when they’re thirteen or fourteen, it’s their lexicon, it’s a newly learned vocabulary. That’s where sometimes as an artist you forget the importance of what you do, because music is what carried you to the point of doing it later in life. “Everyone has one song or a band that seem to take the words out of your young, teenage mouth before you could form them and for The Chameleons were one of those bands."