"There are many compilations of Greek Rembetiko music, but I chose this one because it has some classics on it that I’ve been aware of for a long time. In the early 20th-century, after the First World War after Kemal Atatürk came to power in Turkey, there was an exchange – to put it politely – an exchange of population between Greece and Turkey and was extremely unpleasant at the time for both countries. At that time, a lot of Greeks who had lived in what’s now Turkey for a really long time, moved over and came to Piraeus as refuges and brought this music with them which was a mixture of Greek central European and Asian or western Asian sort of music and it evolved into this form of street music played by these guys called Mangas – the wide boy, gangsters, hoodlums of Piraeus in the 20s. It’s funny in Greece still today; some people don’t like to be reminded of that side of Greek history. It’s seen as anti-bourgeois – it’s the only way I can put it. The songs were about whores, smoking dope, stabbing your mates or being done over or sticking up for your mates – these classic themes – but because they were sung not only in Greek but in an impenetrable dialect that most modern Greeks would find hard to get their head around, though it didn’t really get that far past Greece itself. The history is fascinating but the music is like nothing else that I know. Also, even though I grew up in Scotland, I still feel this strong connection to the Greek side of my background, and when I listen to this music I feel I can connect with this history that I know preceded me and I don’t have a direct contact with myself, it’s a way I can understand a little bit of where I came from."

"I heard this around second year at school, I must have been about 13. I bought it on vinyl and just caned it. The production on it is great. The Meteors were completely obsessed with 1950s music, doo-wop, rockabilly. And they were purists, you know. They despised people like the Stray Cats and the Polecats and the more charty bands of the time. Nigel Lewis, the bass player, I was quite influenced by his voice. In early Sleafords stuff I try and mimic it a little. It still sounds great. It's almost comical, lots of horror references. The Meteors invented psychobilly, there weren't any psychobilly bands around before them. It would be interesting to talk to Nigel Lewis, I tried to contact him but he never really got back to me. He left after the first album and they went to shit after that really. Well, now it sounds alright. But they got more thuggish, it wasn't very intelligent. There was a little bit of nerdiness about it at the beginning. Once Nigel Lewis left, P Paul Fenech got really arrogant and it married itself to the scooter scene at the time, which was predominantly white lads on scooters, pilot jackets, skinheads. It wasn't a very nice scene at all. There was a streak of racism, very misogynistic as well, just not very intelligent. Scooter rallies were quite hostile environments, you know. I went to one in Donnington in about 1984 and Desmond Dekker played and there were skinheads trying to get onstage and batter him with pieces of wood. It was just terrible. There was a little mod contingent but it was mostly this new breed of second generation mods who turned out to be scooter boys and psychobillies as well, the two things merged almost, it wasn't very nice. I was interested in the scooter thing and mod thing but I wasn't too taken with this, ""Oh fuck off, get your tits out!"" thing, and there was a lot of that. It just wasn't very inspiring."