"Temple, Texas is very religious. A lot of churches and fast food restaurants. Football is really big in the city. And around 15, I was starting to realize that this type of environment didn’t feel good to me. By then I was into new wave music. There were cultural dividing lines: Metalheads had a thing, country western people had a thing, and the popular kids might have been more into pop-rock. But if you were into Art of Noise, New Order, the Cure, and Depeche Mode, it was a little weird. I had a lot of friends on the soccer team who thought I was queer. But there was a group of people in my high school who knew about these bands. We all dressed a little bit funny and we would catch hell for it. There were fights for sure. If you went to the mall or a party, there was always a chance that someone was going to want to fuck with you. I got in a fight in a classroom when a guy made fun of my Frankie Goes to Hollywood shirt. I took that very personally and knocked him on his ass. And I got sent to the principal for that, and I had to bend over his desk, and he swatted me. A lot of cowboys would call me and my friends “queer bitches.” So we adopted it and started calling each other that. It took some sting out of it. One time, this guy called my friend a “queer bitch,” and my friend licked his hand and wiped it on a cowboy’s truck and said, “Yeah, that’s right—and I got those AIDS.” The cowboy flipped out and drove off. Parade by Prince came out right when I was 15, and I was obsessed with him. I got that album the day it was released. The single “Kiss” had come out before, and the very first time I heard it I was like, “How could there be a better single than this?” It’s just undeniable. That song became what a single was to me—something stripped down, so you could focus on a few key elements that were just perfect. Prince was just the coolest, most creative thing happening. And he could fucking dance. I always thought the coolest job would be to make records, but for a long time I didn’t really think about how I would go about that. I just thought, “Something will happen.” And then I got wise and learned how to play an instrument. When I was 16, a girl I had a crush on left for college, and I borrowed a friend’s acoustic guitar and taught myself to play it as I was recovering/suffering from my first real breakup. I was pretty devastated. I would come home from school every day and just be in my room playing guitar and thinking about her, writing letters, listening to records."

"The ‘60s things we’ve discussed were a really big influence on me - it almost seemed like an early dream - but then I got into the Bowie, glam rock thing, which was my first choice of things in a way. That led me into New York punk rock and that’s the bit that made me pick up the guitar. I’d played the guitar a bit, but along with Television, Talking Heads made me want to be in a band and that whole scene inspired me much more than English punk rock. That time very much felt like a new chapter - ‘out with the old, and in with the new’ - and I guess that’s what punk rock was, but I thought a lot of the English punk bands were a bit crap. There were a few good ones and a lot of people talk about The Clash and The Pistols, but for me it was Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Blondie, MC5, New York Dolls and Iggy Pop. I loved all that stuff and it somehow seemed to fit with glam rock, with Bowie, Roxy Music and Marc Bolan and led me into Talking Heads and that whole thing. When I was an unemployed kid I’d get the bus into town, wander around and meet loads of people who wanted to form bands. There weren’t many people into The Velvet Underground back then, which I was at the time and I was a bit of a misfit in many ways. Matthew Street in Liverpool was a run-down area of empty warehouses then and there was nothing much there, but I met a lot of likeminded people around a warehouse called The Liverpool School of Music, Dream, Art and Pun and that was where I first met a lot of the guys who ended up in my first band. Opposite to that there was a record shop called Probe, a tea rooms and a club called Eric’s, and they became the centre of my everyday existence. Eric’s was set up by a guy called Roger Eagle who had been in Manchester. He was a Northern Soul DJ and a music aficionado and was heavily involved in the scene. Although those bands weren’t mainstream at that point, I got to see them all at Eric’s, which was brilliant. We got let into the gigs for free in return for helping them to carry amps and I got to chat to all of the bands that I loved at the time. As a song, “Psycho Killer” really stood out. It was very compelling and there was the whole idea of how David Byrne looked like he was a college professor or something, he was so awkward and gangly, but he had brilliant words. I remember thinking at the time ‘He’s not singing about the usual things, how are these words in a song? How do you do this?!’"

"Ooh! Oooh! It's almost like [an album] that's never been repeated. Bryan Ferry has come close but it was a moment in time for them as a band. It could have been a nightmare to make for all I know but it's beautiful and incredible. At the time I was listening to that, I was getting into the sounds of records and perceiving how they were made and the depth in that record is incredible. Bob Clearmountain mixed it and I wondered [at the time]: what does a mixer do? And then you start to realise 'ah – that's what he does'. The main difference between my hits later in the 1980s and a record like this is that the musicianship on Avalon is pretty amazing. They could choose anyone to play on their records as could Bryan Ferry afterwards. And the nucleus of what their band was pretty amazing itself. Their understanding of what you could get out of a studio was incredible. My records with Stock, Aiken and Waterman are [comparatively] quite narrow. SAW had a bunch of keyboards but not many, maybe two or three they really liked. A Yamaha DX7, Jupiter 8 and the Linn 9000 were their workhorses. They had their little set up and that was the band. Mike and Matt were the two musicians. Matt was an amazing guitar player but he never put that to the front because it wasn't needed. He was a Ringo guitar player - he didn't do anything that wasn't needed! They were all about trying to write and produce hits for the Top 40. No – the top 5! That's all they were bothered about. They didn't do anything that was surplus to requirements. But they also made some crap records that nobody heard! But they found their formula and stuck to it like their Motown heroes. It never seemed cynical to me because they were honest about it. They weren't trying to be cool. They did go out and accept awards but generally speaking, they turned up in jeans and t-shirts – well, Pete was slightly different because he was A&R and the mouthpiece – because they viewed it as work. I met Lamont Dozier once and he said 'I get up, go into my basement, sit at the piano, press play and record and sit there for two hours. Then I come up, have breakfast, answer my mail, do whatever I do, and I go and listen it afterwards, find the good bits and say 'that's a song''. So it's quite workmanlike in a way. I don't think anybody would belittle anything Motown did. But if you want to put a negative slant on it, it's a factory style of doing things. But I also think: that's bollocks. If you're gonna be good at something, you have to put the hours in."