"So it's spring, early summer in 1977. I'm a teenager that's started school. I read a book about a punk. I know something's happening. I heard 'God Save The Queen'. I started buying records like The Stranglers' 'Peaches' and The Clash's first album. I remember looking at the cover of the latter at a record store at the bottom of my street called Soundtrack Records. I remember looking at the three guys on the cover with brutally shorn hair, tight drainpipes and wearing shirts with Paul Simonon having a Union Jack stitched on over the pocket. There was also a photo of the Notting Hill riots with the police fighting the Rasta youth. Earlier that year I watched a documentary with my father about the Notting Hill riots at the carnival. I found it really inspirational because I just love seeing the youth rise up and take on the cops. It was a pre-punk moment of seditious confrontation that I found totally inspiring. Just seeing people saying ""fuck you"" to the system is always inspiring to me. In terms of the Clash album itself, the song titles even sound great, such as 'I'm So Bored With The U.S.A.', 'White Riot', 'London's Burning' – I was like, ""Fuck!"" before I'd even heard the record! It totally blew my mind and I ended up buying the record. For a long time I'd stood outside the record store and looked at the sleeve! This album was basically everything I was waiting for. It was my rock & roll. Previous to that, I'd heard rock songs on commercial top-40 radio stations, such as Deep Purple, The Who and Rolling Stones, but it felt like a different generation's music. So with The Clash, I finally found my thing. The songwriting on the Clash album is amazing. 'Remote Control' lyrically was about big business and not liking the things you do. You got no money, you got no power, they think you're useless and that's exactly how you feel. I thought, ""Fucking hell"" when I heard it back. You still felt as a kid scared of going into the adult world when you left school. The song wasn't rock bravado or being macho but about being a young person going out into the world for the first time feeling powerless, which was empowering because when you relate to something, you feel stronger. 'Hate & War' was another song that took the hippie ideal of love and peace and turned it on its head by saying: ""There ain't no love and peace, this is the '70s, it's fucking hate and war here."" Punk rock was my portal and pathway to being a creative person. And the first Clash album was everything to set me on my way. Even now, I feel quite emotional talking about this. It's the most emotional record the Clash made because there's something really pure about it. I also think there's a humanism that the Clash have that the Pistols didn't, as the latter were just pure rage. For those reasons, this record is my life."

"My first gig I ever went to, when I was nine, was at Wembley Stadium to see the Bad tour. When he died, I was in my bedroom in Brighton and I heard it on the radio and I just spontaneously absolutely burst into tears. Michael Jackson, when I was little, was just this God-like being. You know when you're little and you're singing in the car with your mum and your brother and the sister, the world is so good, there's nothing more fun and nothing better. I don't think I've ever listened to someone singing something with that much joy, he was channelling something so fucking out there and it's like he constantly had a bolt of creativity running through his body, like the way he danced and the way he moved. A consummate dancer, referencing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and James Brown and all these people that he channelled but made completely and uniquely his own. I saw a Spike Lee documentary the other night about Bad. Someone else wrote 'Man In The Mirror' but he took and did all of his - [mimics Michael Jackson] "I'm gonna make a change" - and all of that shit. It's just like, who else would do that? Who else would wear plasters all around their jacket? Who wears white socks with loafers and manages to make it look cool? Nobody was telling him to do that. He's just this fucking eccentric one-off. When he died, I thought the climate of music will never be like that again. It was like he was a child and his brain was a playground and anything he could think of, he bloody manifested that in the world; not many people can do that. The arc of music that he lived through, his education and his training all the way through, coincided with all these revolutions in music, music videos and dance. I just think that that was a one-off thing. I'm getting philosophical now [laughs], but I was watching Brian Cox the other day and his astro-physics thing and he put 50 stones all in a row on a desert floor and he was like "each of these stones represents billions of years in the history of the universe and where it's going to go." Then he went "here's one stone" and he showed about a millimetre of that stone: "in this bit, this is where the conditions were perfectly right for mankind to exist, this is this time, we're here now". When you think about culture and popular music from the 50s through 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, it does feel like there has been a bit of a cycle, and I've been lucky that I came in at the end of that cycle. People that were born in the 50s had it amazing, because they got to see fucking David Bowie and punk music, but Michael Jackson was a guy that happened in our lifetime. I get really passionate about music, but music, for some people, it's like a religion and he was like a fucking icon."