"In more recent years, I decided if I was going to play acoustic punk music I wasn’t going to be the guy that just bangs on a guitar. I wanted to learn how to play guitar and use it to dictate what I needed to say, as well as my lyrics. So I took online lessons to learn about finger picking and I learnt Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits, note for note. I think it’s one of the most beautiful love songs in the world, and I love the fact that he doesn’t even sing it. He just talks it. I adore Mark Knopfler for that. He seems so unaffected in this song. He didn’t care about Wham! or Oingo Boingo or whatever was popular at the time. He just said, ‘I’m singing like this and I’m finger picking because that’s what I love.’ That goes right back to Bob Dylan for me: from Just Like a Woman to Romeo and Juliet. And when I finally learn how to play that song note for note I’m going to play it for people."

"Take great care with this documentary film of an all-day concert staged by John Phillips in small-town Monterey, California, for it holds within it the greatest single performance by any electric-music instrumentalist you have ever seen, or are likely to: the U.S. debut of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Known as the man who revolutionized the electric guitar, Jimi Hendrix appears onstage in this film a man possessed. As David Bowie sang in “Ziggy Stardust”: “He could lick ’em by smiling/ He could leave ’em to hang/ They came on so loaded, man/ Well hung and snow-white tan/ . . . He was the nazz/ With God-given ass/ He took it all too far/ But boy could he play guitar.” Never will you see a performance so sensual. There are many great films to be found of Jimi playing, but none to rival this. In Monterey Pop, there are many performances worth watching, seminal, even—Janis Joplin, Otis Redding among them—but they are all just warm-up acts to Jimi, the greatest rock-and-roll star to ever tread the boards."

"I often say there's a fight going on for best debut album ever, it might be The Velvet Underground & Nico or it might be Marquee Moon… there's a constant scuffle going on. Marquee Moon is a masterpiece. To come out with that album at that time with punk kicking off… It was cerebral and virtuoso, largely everything that punk wasn't. I remember I went to see them doing the tour when it came to the Free Trade Hall, and they were just another one of those bands who were fully formed when punk happened. If you hear 'Little Johnny Jewel' – there's nothing like that song that comes from anywhere else. I went to see them when they opened for Patti Smith at the Academy and I spent most of the night just watching Lloyd's guitar work. He is one of the greatest guitarists ever; and he's a guitar teacher now in New York. It's just a remarkable album, filmic. This came out when I was 16 and I was a roadie for The Fall in 1977."

"It’s the seminal punk rock album ever and it's the album that inspired 10,000 punk bands. It's so minimalist and raw - the production and even the way it's recorded and mixed, with the guitar panel inside the bass and drums. It clocks in 23 minutes or something; it sorta set the tempo for at least one thang that punk-rock would become. The lyrics were sort of cartoony but they also had this stern attitude. It's the classic classic punk rock album."

"It was the first song that I ever sang at a live talent show when I was seven years old. There were 400 people in the audience. It was in Mission, B.C., where I was born and raised, and my dad actually accompanied me on the acoustic guitar. We played the Bangles and 'Beauty and the Beast,' and I won that competition. It was like my first time out on stage, and my first thrill of winning a little trophy."

""Nevermind"' by Nirvana was one of the first albums I distinctly remember buying, and I bought it purely on the basis of the cover. It was the first record I had a true connection to, I had it on day in day out and eventually my dad asked if I’d like a guitar so I could learn to play it. I learnt it from start to finish and from that moment I wanted to be a singer in a rock band.'"