"Unfortunately I never saw them, but Kilburn & The High Roads [Ian Dury’s first band] used to play near where we were hanging around as kids. I was a couple of years younger than the rest of the band, who went to see them at the Tally-Ho. They were a huge phenomenon round our way. And they made a great album called Handsome, but a lot of the stuff Ian Dury was working towards on that album really came to fruition on New Boots And Panties. It was slightly infused by the whole punk thing, it had that wild energy, but it still had that vaudevillian faded grandeur of the music hall. Again, it’s about comedy and terror: “arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks” is a pretty fun thing to hear when you’re a teenager, coming out of the speakers! He was pretty acerbic in person. I remember I was with Clive Langer once, our producer, and he said “Ian, I love your work” and Ian said “So fucking what?” That was about the strength of it, with Ian. We got to know him better near the end. He played one of our Madstock gigs, and we recorded a track with him just before he died, called ‘Drip-Fed Fred’, which is rather good. I think he always saw us as slightly usurping him, which is kind of true. He could be very acidic. When he was working in our studio, I remember the police were called a couple of times. But an amazing artist and fantastic lyricist, and of course you listen to some of those songs now, ‘Clever Trevor’, ‘Billericay Dickie’, ‘Plaistow Patricia’ and all that, and they haven’t dated at all."

"I heard this when I was living up in the North East by listening to Kid Jensen. I had On The Beach, but hearing After The Gold Rush... Somehow Jensen had it, it was released in the States before it came to Europe, and I remember being really impressed by the sound and content. I think Neil Young is an example of somebody who is successful and very curious, and I think the freedom that he got, financial freedom as much as anything, he took that and turned it into his obsessions, his railway collections and whatever else. That meant he could go, 'I can do what I want to do, so I will'. It's still the tone on the guitar, and the two-note guitar solo, it's astonishing. Why have more when you can sound that good? He's in Wire's minimalism, and you can see his influence go right through - I'm not saying people are trying to emulate him, but you can see it in Earth, in Sunn O))), it's there. The only person who is comparable, and they're totally different, is Scott Walker. It's this obsessive curiosity of wanting to find out what would happen if I do that or apply this to this. And courting failure; publish and be damned. In that way I was going to name him, because I couldn't have Blue by Joni Mitchell. Look I've snuck that one in there. The happy thing with being in Wire was that we could talk about these records, because there was more to life than punk's ground zero, or whatever it was supposed to be. How many great punk records are there? First Ramones album? You know what I mean."