"I picked this, but it's virtually impossible to pick one [Drake record] and not another. There is no inconsistency in Nick Drake as far as I'm concerned, he's just extraordinary. I picked this one because I had to pick an album, I had to put him in there and I could't choose all the albums. I think I did this very honestly - that was the first record I heard by him, and I thought I'll be honest and I'll be loyal to that! 'Time Has Told Me', 'River Man' - it just has so many fucking great songs on it! 'Cello Song', 'Fruit Tree'; it's kind of the classic songs. I don't know what to say about Nick Drake - it's like trying to talk about air or your arm, or just something that's so much a part of your life and has been for so long now. If you want an introduction to Nick Drake, just start there; it's a great place to start. I've never tried to deliberately replicate him, but there's a song on my new album that's a complete rip-off of a guitar intro to one of his songs! It wasn't until Tom [Rowlands of the Chemical Brothers] walked in and went ""ah yeah, Nick Drake, great"" and I was like ""really?!"" And it was right under my nose - I think he's just become such a part of my... everything, I'd never even noticed that I'd gone ahead and done that."

"My Dad also turned me onto The Stooges and their record Fun House. “Down on the Street” was another one of those songs that had me mouth agape, drooling and not knowing what I was listening to exactly. It was like sound effects. He was making a sound from that guitar - that reverb on that riff is the sweetest reverb in Rock and Roll history - and Iggy is singing through an amp which is all fucked up and distorted. “Down on the Street” is something that’s strange and I like it that way. It’s not something I analyse or geek out on, it makes you feel a certain way and makes everything tougher and cooler. Talk about swagger, that song is the epitome of swagger. It’s like performance art. My Dad turned me onto them but listening to bands like The Damned and Nirvana led me back to them. I’m always coming back to that record, it’s so raw and so punk, it’s a masterpiece. Fun House is fucking incredible, song after song too. It’s unrelenting until the end, finally, you get a nice long jam. I’ve always been interested in whatever Iggy does. He’s one of those real freaks, he’s a true, true artist, who feels his way through life and I like that. It’s one of those things, but I wish I was in that band. I would have loved to have been in that band!"

"The first song that I think put me in a musical direction was probably Just Like a Woman by Bob Dylan, which I realise is not a very PC song now. I actually just had a think about how unacceptable that song would be in today’s day and age. But I think if you say something like that without any malice or highbrow nature then you could reverse it and say ‘just like a man’ as well. I definitely had a moment with it recently though where I was like, ‘I would not write that song today.’ But it was a revelation at the time: it was just a guy with a guitar and some lyrics and not even a good voice. That kind of hit me and I said, ‘I could do that.’ “This was probably during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and I was listening to stuff like Guns N’ Roses and Nirvana, but I wasn’t ever able to play like that, and growing up in suburban New Jersey I had no idea what Mr. Brownstone was. I was just pissed because I was in the suburbs and there was nothing to do. I was dealing with this whole lower middle-class frustration thing. Right after that, I heard the first Clash record and I made the connection between the harmonica that Joe Strummer was using with the harmonica that Bob Dylan was using."

"When I was young I always dug listening to live concerts. It was like we were there. I always think that live albums are a good way to represent a body of work anyway because it shows the songs as part of a collection better than, say, a greatest hits record. It wasn't so much that Cheap Trick At Budokan was live, it was more the selection of songs. Rick [Nielsen] was really an amazing showman as a guitar player as far as the tricks that he did were concerned. Plus, the power that he had despite being essentially a three-piece rhythm outfit was amazing. Then you had Tom [Petersson] with his twelve-string bass… Whoever thought someone would play something like that? I could have done without some of the squealing but having gone to Japan so much; I get it. That's their way of showing you that they loved you. I never really considered Cheap Trick to be a glam rock band. People forget that Rick used to have long hair before he transitioned to having short hair and wearing baseball caps when they supported KISS in 1977. Take a song like 'Hello There'. It has such a killer, punk rock attitude. It reminds me of Mötley Crüe doing a song like 'Live Wire': you don't expect that kind of aggression and when you hear it you think, ""Alright, you dudes can let it rip when you want to.""