"I grew up with the Little House characters - I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder's books as a kid. Little House in the Big Woods is written for a younger child, and as you mature, the books do too. I was confused when my daughter did not like them at all. -- in Redbookmag.com I started reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series when I was 8. The drama of the series was enhanced by the fact that I knew these were true stories – the hardships and pleasures of the pioneer life she described had actually happened to a little girl, and not only had she survived it, but she had grown up to write about it too. The most emotionally wrenching and enthralling of the series was “The Long Winter,” a depiction of the winter her family endured in 1880-81 while they were living in South Dakota. The winter blizzards lasted seven long months, during which the railroads stopped running to their town, and her family was trapped inside their house, subsisting on a very meager diet of potatoes and brown bread. I can still remember the passages where Ingalls described twisting hay into sticks all day for fuel for the fire, and her worry that they would finally run out of hay and they would freeze to death. It kind of made my pre-adolescent worries pale by comparison."

"I’d just say Greatest Hits, if we’re making a list of albums to turn people on, a greatest hits will do fine. Some of that music I listened to when I was nine to thirteen did not stand the test of time, but Sly and the Family Stone is kind of ridiculous in how good it is. Songs, musicianship, just fucking weirdness, sound and ‘how the fuck’; again - as I was saying about 1999 – you’re just scratching your head, like, ""how did this happen?"" If you play in a band and you’re young and you haven’t listened to Sly and the Family Stone, then your band is gonna fucking suck [laughs]. Probably not a true statement, but to me it is. I grew up in the seventies so I’d hear these stories, like he didn’t turn up to his gig, he was four hours late to the gig... I mean they were huge but it was just willy nilly live. I would say the influences on my bass playing was a really wide thing, I didn’t really decide I was going to be a bass player until I was 19, 20. I was playing drums, I was playing guitar, I was playing bass and when I finally took that big step and said, ""okay, I’m going to be a bass player"" and I kind of melded a load of things together. The band Magazine, that bass sound with the chorus on the bass... it took me some years to work out that effect, 'cos I didn’t know much about effects in the eighties, but the sound you hear with Guns is really derived from listening to that first Magazine record, combined with first Sly and the Family Stone and Prince, with a real punk rock ethic underlining the whole thing."