"I was not really listening to what was going on in 1979. A lot of popular music wasn’t very good. There was a lot of punk hangover and a lot of it was a bit… whatever. At that point, Wire were stratospheric; it wasn’t really important to listen to what other people were doing. We didn’t have anything to do with Gang of Four. They were coming from a very different place. We studiously ignored Joy Division because they seemed a little too derivative of us. Maybe that seems like arrogance in hindsight but that’s how it felt at the time. Bert Jansch’s Avocet was very off compared to what was going on in music in the late ’70s. I knew about him when I was in school because he was in Pentangle. The whole thing with music fans in the late ’60s was all about: “Are you Jimi or Eric?” Then there was a group of us who were a bit cooler who said: “Are you Bert or John?” Which meant John Renbourn, the other guitarist in Pentangle. The kind of people who liked Jimi Hendrix would sit in their room playing solos and making a guitar face."

"And then I’ll go to my third one, which of course I would say… Most people would go with The Empire Strikes Back, but I gotta go with Star Wars, the original. The Summer tentpole, it was something we had never seen before. I remember, back in the day it was all those exorcism movies, you know, it was the same time when all that was going on when they were like, “The Tempter!” and you turn around and it’s a scary movie. And then there was Taxi Driver, and all these weird… Everything had a weird aura to it, you know what I mean? And my mother was like, “I can’t take you to the movies! You’ll see something crazy!” So my aunt took me to see Star Wars. That was the only thing that we could see as kids. It was either that or The Apple Dumpling Gang, and I was like, “We can’t go that young!” [laughs] But Star Wars, man, I mean… It was really the sci-fi thing. Still to this day, I’m a sci-fi nut. I love it. It’s one of those things that influences me to this day."

"I think I must have heard it on tour in the late 90s. When you’re a kid you know Lust For Life or The Passenger and all about his work with Bowie. But when it came to less well-known stuff, it was different. It was before you could find things out so easily, you just had to know a bit about the artist and dig around a bit. When I heard this I thought, “What a great band, what a great time!”. It’s got that slightly postpunk feel, it’s so tight, the drums are really dry. And I love the backing vocals – when the rest of the band do them it’s like a gang but it isn’t laddy; it’s got a cool sophistication about it. I think that’s what Iggy brings to things: he’s raw, he’s kind of punk, but he always has a sense of style. Maybe that’s what Bowie and Iggy saw in each other, that common ground of not over-intellectualising things, of being throwaway but with care and thought. And I love his lyrics, they can be funny – especially with some of the ad-libs – but always cool."

"I got into this a few years back when I was really getting going with the solo thing. I thought, “This is unusual.” It reminds me a bit of ESG. I really love that delivery – those female vocals that have a drive, power and confidence but are punk and not flying around everywhere. It’s edgy and cuts through in a really cool way. It’s so refreshing in these days of immediacy to hear something like this. I hear some debut EPs that sound like really expensive records and you think, “Where’s the growth coming from here?” When we first started out it was always about playing together ’cos there was no other option – I was too young to get a gig and I wasn’t allowed in venues – so you play, write, mess around and watch movies. There were no distractions, we were just a gang in a living room in front of an open fire, messing around. We did some quick bashed-out B-sides and ropey gigs but it was about the attitude. I wish I saw more uncertainty and vulnerability in young artists."

"I heard that when it first came out in 2010. I've got it on CD. He was a member of the Flipmode Squad so he'd done his time already I think. He probably felt like an old bastard as well - he's probably older than me! You've got the obvious misogyny in there and there was lots of that, but there was this real interest in the history of the pimp, which is a controversial subject, but it's almost like he's done his research on it and looked at it in a political sense. It's not just blatant misogyny as well, but then it is, it swipes over to that, and then it swipes over to gang on the corner, shooting, drugs. I get the impression that a lot of the time this is stuff he has observed. A lot of the time, these rappers like Conway the Machine and West Side Gunn, used to be dealers but had to step out of it to go professional. So they have this whole memory bank of experiences to draw from and then in that environment it's probably very close to you."