"At the end of 1980, Glenn Branca had a tour booked so I quit my day job to go on it, so on the one level it was kind of this fulfillment – ‘wow I’m actually going to go on a fucking rock & roll tour, how great is this?’ And I think it was the end of me having day jobs in New York, which was kind of also an amazing thing to think about. The first tour was in the US and it was wrapped up in all this kind of weird stuff. We were on the West Coast when Lennon was shot. He was one of my great early heroes and one of the reasons why I was involved in any of this stuff to begin with, and he gets shot while I’m on my first rock & roll tour. It felt kind of heavy in a certain way. A few months later we went to Europe and when we played Berlin, Neubauten was the opening act and it was their second ever gig. So I got to see them at the very beginning and meet all those guys. Sheet metal music on cymbal stands - they were really just putting it together at that point, their music also progressed really fast in the early period, but this was just an early primitive version of what they were doing. I met all of those guys, Mufti and Blixa and Alexander and Alex and I some German relatives so I had an affinity with Germany to begin with, and we became friends right away, so I’ve known them since the early 80s, when they really started doing their thing it was this parallel rise to what Sonic Youth was doing. We came out of New York, out of the stuff that was coming out of New York and Black Flag and Minutemen the West Coast stuff, but at the same time all this stuff that was going on in England – the Birthday Party, was there at that point and we had met them, and in that same early period Lydia Lunch had taken us to one of the last Birthday Party shows in New York and we met Nick, Rowland (S. Howard), Mick Harvey and all those guys. Shortly after that when Sonic Youth first started coming to England, the Bad Seeds wanted Sonic Youth to be their opening act. Those early Neubauten records were just so impressive in what they were doing because again Blixa comes out of all this Germanic Berthold Brecht art music as well as this extreme stuff, and they took their extremism to welding torches and grinders on stage. It’s all music on a certain level, didn’t John Cage teach us that, or Stockhausen or Varèse? What Neubauten was doing was really coming out of this same climate of ‘we’ve got electric guitars on stage but we’ve also got noise-makers that could tie our music back to futurist music of the 20s’. I think the really dominant thing about all these groups from that period was that these were no longer kids that grew up in middle America that heard rock & roll and put a band together in their garage after high school and just went out and did their thing, these were all people that were arts educated and went to university and were steeped into 20th century art making practice whether it was music, or visual art or experimental theatre. For me I grew up with pop music on the radio in the kitchen of my house every morning before school, there was an AM radio blasting the latest 7” singles, you couldn’t get away from it, but at the same time I got educated in all this other stuff so all these people wanted to combine this stuff, they didn’t want to leave their education behind and pretend they were ruffians in the garage that were uneducated and idiots savants – kind of like the Stooges were a real version of that, although I couldn’t say enough about Iggy and his smartness. When Neubauten was doing that stuff it wasn’t tongue in cheek but it was marshalling a lot of different influences, not just simple pop influences. This is some of the most remarkable music ever, and the shows they put on, they were dangerous in an extreme way with sparks flying off the stage. Sonic Youth played this famous show in the Mojave Desert in 1984, and Neubauten did one in the same series, within 4 or 5 months of our show. We had a lot of early symbiotic relationships with all those groups."

"For me, this is the best guitar fuzz sound on record; it’s absolutely brilliant. I’ve been trying to get that sound and I’ve never got close, I’ve no idea what it is, apparently The Music Machine made their own pedals. They’re well-known to people who are into garage, psych-y stuff and I discovered them via Nuggets or Rubble compilation, or something like that. It’s strange, I love that song - I’m not hugely keen on the vocal but it doesn’t really matter to me on this song, it suits its purpose. It’s like the opposite of The Zombies’ Colin Blunstone’s voice. It’s not sweet and melodic, it’s gritty and punky and not my usual sort of thing but it screams attitude to me. It’s the sleaziest thing I’ve ever heard and it’s very, very inspiring for production. It’s the whole groove of it, the whole thing, but it all comes back to that guitar fuzz sound. With bands like The Beatles there’s so many books that go into the recording techniques, but not so with The Music Machine. Personally, I’ve learnt that the problem with fuzz tones is that, for example, people say you can get the fuzz sound from The Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ by buying a Maestro Fuzz-Tone pedal, but I’ve seen countless demo’s of them and it sounds nothing like it, because it all depends on all the elements, like whether the guitar went straight into the board or if it was played through a broken speaker, or any number of things. There’s no way of knowing for sure. Maybe it’s because it was the ‘60s. Things weren’t documented but I still do it now, I get a sound and I won’t make notes on it because it’s like, “Why would I sit there and make notes on exactly what I did?”, so it becomes kind of lost and when people ask, “How did you get that sound?”, I don’t remember. Maybe it’s something that’s meant to happen - almost like you’re not meant to know, for ‘Trouble’ maybe it was the sound of the leather gloves they wore. The Music Machine had a very strange look, I think the singer wore a single leather glove and the rest of them wore roll necks and medallions."

"I’ve chosen this because it was such an amazing thing to happen. It sounds really good and it was such a brand new kind of sound. It really was! Not just because me and George [Harrison] produced it but it was the actual thing of it existing even. It came about as a whim when I was working with George on Cloud Nine, and he said to me one night after we finished work and we were having a couple of bevies, he said, ""you know what? Me and you should have a group."" And I said, ""well, that’s a good idea. Who would we have in it?"" And he said, ""oh, Bob Dylan."" And I said, ""oh, Bob Dylan, yeah. How about Roy Orbison?"" And I thought we were joking and he says, ""yeah, OK. Roy’d be great."" And then we both said ""Tom Petty"". We both loved Tom and we’d met him a couple of times. Anyway, everybody wanted to join so that was how the Wilburys came about. And so we went to LA, recorded ‘Handle With Care’, at first as a bonus track for George’s single off Cloud Nine, but when [label boss] Mo Ostin heard it he said, ""you can’t do that! This is the first track off your new group!"" and we all went, ""oh yeah! That’s a good idea."" ‘Cause we had recorded it in Bob Dylan’s garage, which is pretty amazing. We had a barbeque in his back garden and after that we wrote the words to ‘Handle With Care’, finished the words and George had got the chorus but he hasn’t got the verses so I wrote them at dinner time, sang them in the evening and it was finished. We had to mix it at George’s house later. That’s why it’s interesting to me, how it came about. The rest of the songs we did in Dave Stewart’s studio and they were all instant songs. Each song only took a day. We gave ourselves one day to write a song so we did ten days and ten songs. I did have to pinch myself! I got used to it in the end and of course we did another album after Roy had passed but it was a marvellous time and that’s why I chose it."

"Bikini Kill was on tour and we went to this club in Brighton under the pier and the fucking coolest looking girls in the whole universe walked in. They were the band, and they just started singing and they were the Headcoatees. They were just the coolest thing and it was one of the best shows I've ever seen. Then I got the record and really liked their version of the song 'When You Stop Loving Me' that's on that album. I always liked garage rock and I felt like they did it so well – it was the kind of music I could listen to all day and be happy. That record is more about personal stuff and I was getting really burnt out. I don't want to just listen to stuff that's about politics all the time. I want to have my guilty pleasures and I'm not feeling guilty about finding them pleasurable. They made me think I want my music to be enjoyable, not just hard all the time. I want there to be moments where it's like: "This is really fun." I always say Bratmobile was a better band than Bikini Kill, partially because I had that anger to propel me forward and also protect me, whereas they have this sort of, "Hey we're at this summer party and we don't care that you don't even know what a summer party is, fuck you." It was like they were having a summer party on stage and I'm invited. They would literally get up, just Molly [Neuman] and Allison [Wolfe] before Erin [Smith] joined the band, and just sing stuff like, "Girl germs, no return", like childhood rhymes. They're doing it in a room full of predominantly men who are, like, Melvins fans and I was just like, "Man, that takes fucking guts." I heard people in the audience say, "I want to do this and this to the singer, we should fucking murder them" and meanwhile I was having my life changed: "This is the most incredible thing I've ever seen." I use that in my performance partially based on them and I definitely saw their vulnerability as a strength instead of a weakness. I wanted to be able to flash between characters that were very traditionally female and have a macho persona as well, so I try to have both and not just be like the Henry Rollins of riot grrrl."