"I’d heard ‘Starman’ on the radio before going to school, and as most lads are, I was interested in football and outer space. Something about his voice and the opening line, just that thing he’d tapped into, and it was me he was suggesting to look out the window. It’s hard to comprehend the impact he had when he came out. I turned 13 in the May of ’72 and it was such a special time and gave my life magical class. I grew up in Norris Green, skint, and what he did was give the gift of inspiration. He changed the world in loads of ways and was probably the last great special person to do that. It was head and shoulders above anything else. To come out looking like that he could have had the biggest backlash. If you ever want to see star quality watch that Top Of The Pops clip, which is what gave me the idea that you need stage presence – you don’t just need it on stage, you need it in life. I missed those years of myself, in how naïve I was, and how un-laddy I was. I was into footy and stuff, but through the Bunnymen I found my own confidence. I was thinking of getting some bangles – thank God I didn’t. The thing about Bowie is that no-one else could have pulled it off. He was hardly ever on telly, and he never went on and mimed. It was just everything about it. People who missed it must’ve been stupid. I remember after Top Of The Pops going to school and asked my mates if they’d seen it and they said, “yeah – the fucking queer.” I didn’t even see that. I didn’t see it as a sexual thing, I wouldn’t have minded if I had have done. It made some sense because I was probably more androgynous than him through my teenage years – girls would ask me if I was a boy or a girl. I’d always tell them they could put their hands down me kecks and find out. When Bowie shaved his eyebrows off I knew something was up. That’s how you can pinpoint when Ziggy ends. His hair started to change and that’s when he stopped being so from-outer-space. I’m very exact on it, because it almost broke my heart. Without Bowie, obviously I’d have been centre-forward for Liverpool. It wouldn’t have been a bad career playing for Liverpool. I was a goal-hanging bastard. Fantastic shot, but I didn’t particularly like going into the 50-50s, the life-threateners. And my eyesight went to shite when I was 13."

"Temple, Texas is very religious. A lot of churches and fast food restaurants. Football is really big in the city. And around 15, I was starting to realize that this type of environment didn’t feel good to me. By then I was into new wave music. There were cultural dividing lines: Metalheads had a thing, country western people had a thing, and the popular kids might have been more into pop-rock. But if you were into Art of Noise, New Order, the Cure, and Depeche Mode, it was a little weird. I had a lot of friends on the soccer team who thought I was queer. But there was a group of people in my high school who knew about these bands. We all dressed a little bit funny and we would catch hell for it. There were fights for sure. If you went to the mall or a party, there was always a chance that someone was going to want to fuck with you. I got in a fight in a classroom when a guy made fun of my Frankie Goes to Hollywood shirt. I took that very personally and knocked him on his ass. And I got sent to the principal for that, and I had to bend over his desk, and he swatted me. A lot of cowboys would call me and my friends “queer bitches.” So we adopted it and started calling each other that. It took some sting out of it. One time, this guy called my friend a “queer bitch,” and my friend licked his hand and wiped it on a cowboy’s truck and said, “Yeah, that’s right—and I got those AIDS.” The cowboy flipped out and drove off. Parade by Prince came out right when I was 15, and I was obsessed with him. I got that album the day it was released. The single “Kiss” had come out before, and the very first time I heard it I was like, “How could there be a better single than this?” It’s just undeniable. That song became what a single was to me—something stripped down, so you could focus on a few key elements that were just perfect. Prince was just the coolest, most creative thing happening. And he could fucking dance. I always thought the coolest job would be to make records, but for a long time I didn’t really think about how I would go about that. I just thought, “Something will happen.” And then I got wise and learned how to play an instrument. When I was 16, a girl I had a crush on left for college, and I borrowed a friend’s acoustic guitar and taught myself to play it as I was recovering/suffering from my first real breakup. I was pretty devastated. I would come home from school every day and just be in my room playing guitar and thinking about her, writing letters, listening to records."