"I think I was about 12 or 13 when I first heard Miseducation. A sense of identity was such a big thing I was looking for growing up, because of being the only black girl in my year, my family being this mixed-race family in the middle of Scotland. I did really love growing up there – it gave me a lot of peace growing up in the countryside – but at the same time, part of my identity as a black woman was realised when I heard that album. ""I learnt so much about being a black woman from Lauryn Hill and through her music: who I was, why my hair was like this, how to deal with it. I’ve grown with the album, and even now, when I listen to it – I think I’m older than she was when she wrote it – I feel like there’s all those lessons to be learnt. ""The biggest lesson I learnt from Lauryn Hill as a musician is that you don’t always have to be going extra with your voice! Prior to her I’d listened to all the divas: Aretha, and Whitney, and Mariah. I thought the whole goal of being a singer was to go as high and as loud as possible! Listening to Lauryn, I really learnt about how the tone of your voice can be just as powerful as any tricks you can do with it. ""When I heard 'Tell Him', the track was so stripped. It’s just a live drum loop and her voice on topic, with maybe two backing vocals. They’re doing such beautiful harmonies – I think it was a really big lesson in simplicity and bringing out the soul of who you are through your voice without having to do anything fancy. ""The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was just so raw. I love how she mixed in spirituality with her cultural perceptions and with romance. She showed that you don’t have to take one topic – it was a really full-bodied expression from a woman. I just love that album, and that song is my favourite. ""As a singer and a musician growing up, there’ve been a lot of powerful women that have really led my journey. I also really love hip-hop, I love lyric, so anywhere I can find intelligent lyricism I love. There’s something about a woman’s voice telling an honest story that can really catch my ears. I think I’ve inherited that from my Dad, because he was so in love with the divas and these voices and passed his love down on to me. Strong, independent, and quite outspoken through their music – those are the type of women that would inspire me"

"I saw the New York Dolls support Rod Stewart when he was in The Faces. That was at Wembley Empire Pool. It was the Dolls, the Pink Fairies and the Faces. I was there to see the Faces, and when the Dolls came on you've never seen a room empty so fast. Everybody just headed for the bar. David Johansen had a top hat on and Arthur Kane had some pink patent thigh-length boots and was being propped up at the back. They did a 15-minute version of 'Frankenstein', and that was good enough for me. I hadn't seen anything like it before. I gather Steve Jones was there as well – a few people were there who would go on to form groups. They were these five tough New York kids and dressed like that, it was so provocative, so over the top. They went on The Old Grey Whistle Test and Whisperin' Bob Harris said, ""I want nothing to do with this lot behind me."" I lived in Chelsea in this flat with an American writer and I woke up in the middle of the night once and went in his room and Johnny Thunders was there. He asked me if I had a guitar and showed me a few chords. He was quite a nice bloke. That was when I was first starting out, in '77. He'd been over with the Heartbreakers doing the Anarchy tour with the Pistols. But to wake up and see him sitting there was bizarre. He'd had his hair cut by then. He always looked really smart. I loved the whole look of the New York Dolls. They had a real influence on me. They looked good wearing make-up, but there was no doubt that they were blokes. It was like, ""Come on then, come and do something about it!"" To walk around like that in the 1970s anywhere in America you were risking your life. Tracks like 'Personality Crisis' – I think Malcolm [McLaren] lifted that wholesale for the Pistols, the rhythm section and the guitar sound, the heaviness, the weight of the rock & roll sound they made. That was a big influence on Malcolm. What you saw was what you got with the Dolls. I last saw Johnny Thunders at Dingwalls in Camden. I bought him a brandy. He was sitting there scowling. He was quite a dangerous person. When I was with him once, some girl came up to bug him or say something and he did that thing like in that James Cagney film – he just put his hand on her and pushed her away. He was a real tough nut. A real rotter."

"I feel like this could be an old song but it sounds very modern as well. I love how sleazy and 70s’ it sounds. I picked it because I went to see Fat White Family a few years ago and before I went to see them I'd stopped playing guitar for a long time, given up on the idea of starting a band and had lost interest in music a little bit, I'd been in bands for years but nothing had ever happened. Then I started going out with a guy who was really into music and he took me to see Fat White Family and loads of bands actually around that time, but I saw Fat White Family play in The Macbeth in Hoxton. “It was so exciting! I hadn't really expected anything, I‘d just heard the name and I thought it sounded stupid. I felt like I walked in completely by accident and then I saw them and it felt how it felt and I just knew immediately that I wanted to start playing guitar again and make loud noises with people and have that feeling more. I knew that I wanted to start a band, basically. “I love the distortion on the vocals, on a lot of our earlier recordings I was putting distortion on the vocal, it's a little bit less now but it's still always there. I think it smooths everything over, or sands it down. I really love the tension and release in ‘Auto Neutron’, there's that moment halfway through where he screams and all the music gets loud and I've listened to it over and over again, trying to work out how that sounds so good. That exact moment is so perfectly timed and mixed. “Fat White Family are so guttural and thrusty on stage. It's passionate. It's hard to explain, but it's just really cool. As The Big Moon we really try to feed off the crowd and what they’re doing, you have the odd show where everyone's just standing staring at you and in those situations it feels really strange to be onstage at all and to be making noise, you realise how weird it is that you stand on a box and make loud music and people just watch. “It’s the shows where people let their hair down and have a crazy time that are the best. That's why we go to gigs, to have a physical experience and be there in a place with a load of people you'll probably never see again, but you'll have bonded by the fact that you love this music. You throw yourself into each other. It's so important that we have a reaction like that."

"I’d heard ‘Starman’ on the radio before going to school, and as most lads are, I was interested in football and outer space. Something about his voice and the opening line, just that thing he’d tapped into, and it was me he was suggesting to look out the window. It’s hard to comprehend the impact he had when he came out. I turned 13 in the May of ’72 and it was such a special time and gave my life magical class. I grew up in Norris Green, skint, and what he did was give the gift of inspiration. He changed the world in loads of ways and was probably the last great special person to do that. It was head and shoulders above anything else. To come out looking like that he could have had the biggest backlash. If you ever want to see star quality watch that Top Of The Pops clip, which is what gave me the idea that you need stage presence – you don’t just need it on stage, you need it in life. I missed those years of myself, in how naïve I was, and how un-laddy I was. I was into footy and stuff, but through the Bunnymen I found my own confidence. I was thinking of getting some bangles – thank God I didn’t. The thing about Bowie is that no-one else could have pulled it off. He was hardly ever on telly, and he never went on and mimed. It was just everything about it. People who missed it must’ve been stupid. I remember after Top Of The Pops going to school and asked my mates if they’d seen it and they said, “yeah – the fucking queer.” I didn’t even see that. I didn’t see it as a sexual thing, I wouldn’t have minded if I had have done. It made some sense because I was probably more androgynous than him through my teenage years – girls would ask me if I was a boy or a girl. I’d always tell them they could put their hands down me kecks and find out. When Bowie shaved his eyebrows off I knew something was up. That’s how you can pinpoint when Ziggy ends. His hair started to change and that’s when he stopped being so from-outer-space. I’m very exact on it, because it almost broke my heart. Without Bowie, obviously I’d have been centre-forward for Liverpool. It wouldn’t have been a bad career playing for Liverpool. I was a goal-hanging bastard. Fantastic shot, but I didn’t particularly like going into the 50-50s, the life-threateners. And my eyesight went to shite when I was 13."

"A recent one would be Raw, the Julia Ducournau film. I love that film. I had sort of finished my movie so… Or no, I hadn’t finished it — maybe I was just about to shoot my movie — but I watched it three times in theaters. I can’t believe that’s a debut. It only feels like seasoned masters are able to really manipulate an audience, beat to beat, to really feel like you are being so perfectly manipulated, and you’re just in the hands of someone who has complete control of you. It’s just unbelievable to have out of the gate. But also, she does an incredible — and it’s something I was trying to do in my movie — she is able to just really ground all of her stylized sequences really perfectly in the felt naturalism of the movie, and she does it in such incredibly sly ways that are so, so smart. Like, you know — spoiler — the finger eating scene. The fact that the beginning of that scene is all about them waxing. Like, the waxing is an incredible way to ground the physical reality of their bodies in something we can all relate to, in terms of, you know, none of us have ever eaten a finger, but we all know the feeling of hair being pulled out. It’s a really relatable and yet traumatic pain that we’re seeing and thinking about. It’s similar in the way that the animals are put in in the beginning. Because the bodies are treated so real and so relatably, then when this surreal stuff starts happening, it feels so goddamn real. She’s just eating half of a finger and people were traumatized by it. You know, it’s actually not that gory of a movie. It’s not that extreme of a movie, but she slyly grounds it in realism. And then there’s just these beautiful images over the whole thing. It’s such an economic use of set pieces. The blue paint and the yellow paint, and getting together and turning green. Even her under the covers, that feels like a set piece. She’s so economic with her use of action and framing, and it was something I really wanted to try to do. I felt like I didn’t have a good reference for “How am I going to integrate the stylized sequences I have in my mind into this natural world?” Then when I saw her movie, I’m like, “Oh man, this is exactly what I want to do.” She just has a really incredible eye for what is significant, and all the set pieces are just very muscular. Knowing the set pieces are made from simple clean action that is understood with iconic, and icons are simple. To know that things that are iconic are often very, very simple."