"I have a weird relationship with David Bowie. There's a part of me that didn't want to include him out of bloody-mindedness, not out of any disrespect to him but because I get sick of talking about David Bowie, what with all those comparisons we drew. People said that Suede were like a mixture of The Smiths and Bowie, when actually there are all these other comparisons that could have been made. But I can't get away from the fact that he is a huge influence on what I do, and you can't get away from the fact that he simply is one of the greatest artists of all time and he made some of the greatest music of the 1970s, and six or seven unbelievably good records. Low is just one of them, I could have chosen Hunky Dory, Space Oddity, Scary Monsters, Young Americans. But I've chosen Low because I love the mystery of it, even though it's not his best song album - there's no 'Quicksand' or anything like that. You can tell that he's shifting, and looking for something else. My favourite track on it is 'Warszawa', with its amazing Wagnerian stirring in the music. Suede's 'Europe Is Our Playground' had a sense that it was a version of that. I love the way Low doesn't explain itself, and that it's a really odd record. I love the chronology of it, the fact that three of my favourite records ever were all made around the same time: Low, Never Mind The Bollocks and Music For Airports."

"I'd only heard the singles on the radio in America, and my mother happened to be going to Germany. I said to her: "Get me any copies you can of Jimi Hendrix." Because I loved the shiny covers that you guys got in Europe, unlike the crappy covers we got. This was 1967. The first time I heard him was 'Hey Joe', on the radio. The playing was so fluid. I kept wondering how many people there were in the band. I got to meet them on their very first tour. [He pulls out his phone, and shows a photo of Hendrix, taken on Febuary 28 1968, at a club in Madison, Wisconsin, followed by a photo of the poster for the gig, at which he was supported by Soft Machine]. It was $3.50 to get in, and I got to see two shows - a six o'clock and a 9.30 show. The photo is backstage at that show. I was thinking: "Man, a guy who looks that cool …" It was the best ever show. I've been around so long that I ended up knowing the guy who was his bodyguard - he worked for us for a while. He wasn't a sweet guy, he was a "sleep with the fishes" kind of guy. He said he used to go out with Jimi and they would goof off, and there was nothing mysterious about him. Hendrix had it all: the voice, the songwriting, the guitar playing, and the weirdness. He was from outer space."