"The Cure was my favourite band. The Cure covered my walls, they were on the T-shirts I wore, Robert Smith was who I was going to marry when I grew up. At 15, that's how I defined myself. I owned all the B-sides and rarities and all the bootlegs and went to see them live whenever I could. I still look back at the Cure catalogue as one of my ultimate musical educators, especially because I feel like Robert Smith, as a songwriter, went on so many tangents and wrote so much weird shit. He was clearly a masterful pop songwriter, but he was coming up with stuff that was strange and experimental, and then stuff that was really dark and brooding, and then really funny and poppy. The Cure have this reputation as the glum, sad band, but I never experienced them that way. I experienced the music of the Cure as this adventure in songwriting. Boys Don't Cry was the first record I got, which was a great record to start with. But after that, The Top – what a weird record! Such a departure from the punky, poppy stuff. So I was totally hooked, and totally fascinated by Robert Smith as a person, by what was going on in his head. Any literary reference he made, I ran out and bought the book. I was obsessed."

"They were one of, if not the first, rock & roll male bands that I was really attracted to. I am definitely a female-orientated person, that's just the way I am. I don't go gaga over every single male rockstar that comes out, I sort of tend to be way more interested in the female narrative. But who can resist The Clash? [Laughs] even I could not resist The Clash. 

 I was thrilled by the sound and also the style; they felt like a real gang to me. It really captured my imagination and I wanted to be in The Clash. They still are, arguably, one of the coolest male rock bands of all time, if not the coolest rock band of all time. There's not anybody really that touches them. I love the political bias in their writing and I love the raucousness of it – and I thought they were fucking hot as fuck [laughs]. 

 Again, just amazing songs. Like, I associate 'Rock the Casbah' with a lot of great parties that I went to around about that time. There was a lot of finger-fucking going on to The Clash, an innocent but erotic memory. My sexuality was beginning to really explode when I discovered The Clash so I always associate it with that kind of hotness. It's just The Clash equals hotness. End of story."