"This is the record that made me a guitar player. I got given a guitar aged nine and had been taught a couple of things on it, but it’d basically stayed propped against the corner of the room and not used that much… until I first heard The Smiths when I was 13. It was just like, ‘This is what I want to do – I’m doing this! I’m going to be a guitarist in a band!’ “Johnny Marr was like a surrogate guitar teacher right through my early teens - 13, 14, 15 years old - to when I met Mark Gardener at school. We became mates because he heard I could play the riff off Bigmouth Strikes Again and asked me to show him. "That’s how we became friends, so Ride’s got a lot to thank The Smiths for. I still find some of Johnny Marr’s playing totally baffling, like those swoopy lead parts on How Soon Is Now?.”"

"This is like a greatest hits-type thing, and I picked it up at a record fair when I was about 14. Me and my dad would go to record fairs in Oxford Town Hall, and I’d save up and buy a couple of records each time. “In those days, there was no way of hearing a record without buying it, so a lot of the time you’d buy something based on the sleeve or just based on a recommendation, and I think I bought this because of the sleeve. “I’d heard that The Who were a good band but – when I listened to this - I discovered a whole new level of guitar sonics. Everything about the violence of Pete Townshend’s guitar playing really affected me. He changed the rules of what a solo could be… just some noise could be a solo and, obviously, that became a big part of Ride, because we were all about the noise being an instrument.”"