"Again, this song is totally inspiring from a production point of view. It’s hard to choose just one song from Les Paul and Mary Ford, but this stood out. It’s a great song, despite not being a Les Paul and Mary Ford original. When people think of Les Paul they tend to think of the guitar the Gibson Les Paul, but Les Paul basically invented multi-track recording and a lot of recording techniques that so many of us use today. The stuff that he did on ‘How High The Moon’ and anything from the early ‘50s is just so, so far ahead of its time. It’s all guitar, even the drums are just him tapping his guitar and not in a cheesy, Newton Faulkner kind of way, it’s serious musicality. He was basically recording in hotel rooms, using bathrooms as echo chambers and the like. The arrangement on this track is crazy. It is a bit silly, a lot of the stuff sounds silly because it’s all plinky-plonk, all very high-pitched, mandolin-like guitars, but you’ve got to remember this was in the ‘50s. It makes Rock ‘n’ Roll, which was often just three chords, sound very unimaginative. This kind of track was jazz chords and guitar orchestra, basically. I’ve definitely robbed some of Les Paul’s techniques over the last few years. On the new record there’s some sped-up guitar, half-time drums and things like that, where you basically slow down the tape and create a whole different instrument almost. If you haven’t seen [the Les Paul documentary] Chasing Sound, I highly recommend it. It’s about how he invented the first electric guitar, using a telephone microphone and putting it on a bit of old railway track, putting and stretching a string across it and amplifying it. That was literally the birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll."

"In those days it was all singles. Bands would put out an album with all the singles on so you’d already heard most of it. But this was the first album with great guitar riffs that repeated themselves – AC/DC and The Kinks are definitely related. It had a great guitar sound for the time: a great riff with a great melody on top is the essence of rock music for me; you can’t get away from it, that distorted guitar with the great riff. They weren’t as bluesy as some of the others – they didn’t go to the 12-bar blues all the time, like some bands did. Ray Davies’ lyrics always appealed to me because they were so straightforward – they were always about life. Probably at the time I didn’t notice, but later everyone looked at his work more as poetry."

"I always keep coming back to Safe As Milk. It’s definitely up there with my favorite records. I love the way it’s recorded, the drums and guitar sounds. The more I hear this record the more I uncover."