"It's the same era, yeah. If anything, it demonstrates my eclectic nature, and also it illustrates an amazing period in music history. This album is still my favourite Bjork record, though I love a lot of things she does and I don't want to limit her to this one. It really illustrated the zeitgeist, especially if you were gay. There was a sophistication [to the gay scene] that wasn't being defined by the dance music scene – though maybe a little bit with the Pet Shop Boys. Bjork really brought the whole dance world, the clubbing world, up to this other more introspective level, and dealt with this strange life that everybody seemed to be living: on one hand it was really great and beautiful and passionate, but also very frightening, drug-induced and AIDS-related. She just became this kind of phantom for what everybody was really feeling."

"I'd heard of Andy Warhol, but I'd never heard The Velvet Underground until David Bowie talked about them in interviews in the NME, and of course Transformer. I'd rather talk about Transformer than the banana album actually, because Transformer sums up the era. I do believe that Mick Ronson was very instrumental - like a classically trained musician as well as a gorgeous rock god lead guitarist. His arrangement abilities for both Ziggy Stardust and Transformer have not been fully recognised in the history of pop music. I don't think David would've broke through without that. I remember dancing to 'Vicious' in a nightclub called Masquerade in Liverpool - a really eccentric gay bar full of diesel dykes, prostitutes and older gay men with dyed black hair and toupees. It was a strange netherworld hidden up a back alley that embraced a bunch of freaks of my generation like Pete Burns and me, Jane Casey, who wore too much make-up. That was the thing about a gay club, you were safe almost in there. A strange refuge. I suppose in a way, punk kind of helped that. Absolutely. One minute you were queer on the street, the next minute you were a punk. It normalised that sort of behaviour really, you know; ""Oh, they're just punks"", and it was a diversion away from sexuality. Punk was strangely non-sexual. Even the main protagonist John Lydon had something of a 'neither here nor there' about him."