"Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis is one of the best written accounts of a musician’s life. It carefully takes the myth of Elvis and puts it into human terms, giving you a sense of the shock of the new. From childhood in Tupelo, Mississippi through his years in Memphis, Hollywood and Las Vegas, the book puts you in the room with Elvis and his family, friends and collaborators. In the early years you are struck by the genuine innocence and good-naturedness he personified – an accessible small-town boy. Fans would line up outside his mother’s kitchen and he would come out to spend time with them after finishing the family dinner. You can see a kid trying to navigate an unformed world, a world we now know as the modern music business. He was self-aware, though, and brought a new vulnerability and disregard to performing. The first book ends with his mother’s death and his induction into the army, in many ways the beginning of his descent into drugs and isolation. In Hollywood he becomes commodified and put under a kind of artistic house arrest. It is frustrating to read how often his intentions and creative ideas were thwarted. His music had become carefully controlled and the way he had made his great early music was undermined. Later, in the 70s, you get accounts of him gatecrashing the White House and demanding to be made an FBI agent on the spot (Richard Nixon’s henchmen agreed) or starting his Tennessee Karate Institute with outlandish personalised karate uniforms. Though it is impossible for a book to sum up a life, especially one on the scale of Elvis’s, Guralnick’s accounts are ultimately about the impossibility of coming through your wildest dreams unscathed. But it’s more than a cautionary tale: it’s a document of the ways Elvis embodied the childlike and the primal and turned it into a kind of freedom."

"When you inevitably are asked about your favourite record, you can scratch your head and go through a list, because your taste changes from year-to-year or through different periods of your life. However, I have always been able to say that Raw Power is my favourite from the moment I first heard it, and I don't think it has been equalled since. A couple of friends recommended it to me. At the age of 14, I was starting to play guitar in a certain way and the name [of Stooges' guitarist] James Williamson kept cropping up. A couple of guys I knew assumed I had been listening to Raw Power because of the way I was playing riffs. So I thought I had better investigate. I knew all about Iggy and The Stooges but I wasn't aware of Raw Power. I got the album in about 1976. I had heard so much about it that eventually I want into town to buy it and I picked up a copy for about three quid, which was all I had. The cover alone made me want to buy the record, and, when I heard it, I realised why my mates had been saying what they had. In particular, the song 'Gimme Danger' started off with a riff that was very much like one I was playing with the band I was in at the time. As a guitarist, James Williamson's playing struck me as having the technique of Jimmy Page but with the irreverence and attitude of Keith Richards. I have since become friends with James and have talked to him about what he was doing back then. He knew exactly what he was doing and it was very deliberate, which is always quite impressive. There is a lot more I could say about Raw Power. It gave me a path to follow as a guitar player. It was an opening into a world of rock & roll, sleaze, sexuality, drugs, violence and danger. That's a hard combination to beat."

"""This would've been in my top five for sure - it's a big, big record for me. It's incredible on so many levels. If you want a record that illustrates what music can do in a very different sense, this is it. It's progressive and weird, but it shows you can make a concept album that isn't awful. I grew up in this little town called Dundas in Ontario - actually, I lived outside it, but all my friends lived in town. And this record is like a mythical record in Dundas, because one of my friends found a copy of it in the middle of the road - just lying there - and he brought it home. I wasn't doing any drugs at that point, but it was around that time my friends were smoking weed and doing mushrooms and whatever, so finding a beat-up copy of this record and putting it on it was like: ""HOLY SHIT!!!"" I still can't really listen to that track that's just an infinity symbol - I find it uncomfortable. And then there's 'The Four Horsemen' - that's like the Dundas theme as far as I'm concerned. It captures something of the eccentric spirit of this weird place that I grew up in. At the time that I found out about this record, the only reason I knew about Vangelis was because of the Chariots Of Fire theme, which was pretty terrible or definitely naff. But I love introducing people to this record because it's so far away from what they think Vangelis or Demis Roussos would do, even if you know the Blade Runner soundtrack. It's so far removed from anything that either of those guys was involved in. The music on there is so diverse; each track is completely different. Leading up to the release of the new album I was doing a DJ mix, and because of doing this feature there are now two tracks from this record on that mix! I'd forgotten how fucking good all these tracks are."""