"""If I want to pick my favourite records then I have to pick something from Motown. When you have that kind of catalogue it can be hard pinpoint one act. In my case, it would have to be the Four Tops and therefore I have to pick a greatest hits album. I never had a problem considering the Four Tops as a band. As a little kid they were omnipresent if you were glued to the radio as I was. They were a constant fixture year-in, year-out. They would release incredible songs like 'It's The Same Old Song' or 'Reach Out I'll Be There'. On this album you get to line up all of these songs back-to-back as a complete body of work, or even like a single live performance. You can hear a darkness and, dare I say it, a rocking spirit that you won't get from The Supremes or from Smokey Robinson or even Stevie Wonder, mostly due to the presence of Levi Stubbs' voice. In addition, the music had to match his voice and his range of emotion that you wouldn't even get on a Marvin Gaye record. Not only were the songs powerful, but the arrangements and instrumentation and the performances meant that, as far as I am concerned, Four Tops rock like Led Zeppelin. What more do you need? It is a collection of incredible tunes. I bought this record when it came out and all my mates thought I was either really, really old-fashioned or a freak. I knew I wasn't old-fashioned but what was the alternative? The Boomtown fucking Rats?"""

"That was a real Verve record. We all really got into that. That came to us from Steve Sutherland (Melody Maker) of all people. [The photographer] Tom Sheehan and Steve were early fans of the band and they championed us to some degree. But they dispelled that notion that people in the music industry were cynical music haters. You'd be hard pushed to find people who were as into music as they were. Tom and Steve used to send us tapes and one of the tapes they sent us on one side had On The Beach by Neil Young, and on the other was If I Could Only Remember My Name. Instantly we all went, ""Oh my god, how good is that?"" It became a real Verve favourite; everybody in the band was huge on that. I think the whole record has just got this unique atmosphere. I'm sure drugs have got a lot to do with it. It's a world in itself that record. Sonically, there are some real moments of paranoia on there. It's a very powerful record. You wonder how they were capable of doing something that amazing the state they were all in. But I don't think they managed to do anything quite as good as that. It all became a bit earthbound. It really stands out in the whole Crosby, Stills and Nash canon – that one is the peak for me. It's almost like a diorama; like a little enclosed box that represents a state of mind they were in at the time, and you can look in and have a poke about, like a rock pool. It's like a little universe."

"It's hard for me to choose between The Stooges and Fun House even though they're very different. I probably bought them within weeks of each other in 1980 when I was at college and I loved them both equally, you know? The first record has some of Ron Asheton's greatest guitar leads. The guitar sound is fantastic. It's occasionally got tribal drums which Fun House doesn't have. There's a whole different feel and Iggy's vocals are sort of detached. The Stooges opens up with '1969' and 'I Wanna Be Your Dog', but then there's this mellow thing that lasts nine minutes or something... Oh man! I kind of love 'We Will Fall' for its weirdness We did the Big Day Out in Australia in 1993 and that had us, Iggy, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Beasts Of Bourbon and a few other people on that bill, and we all got on stage to do 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' and had a ball. There's something primal about all of the Stooges. Fun House almost feels like a live set. It's got the show opener 'Down On The Street', it builds up a bit more with another couple of songs and then you flip it over and all of a sudden the saxophone kicks in. The song 'Fun House' in particular is kind of what jazz rock fusion should have been instead of Al Di Meola and shit like that. There's a jazz element but with a totally rocking rhythm section. I suppose I have chosen a lot of records with the sax on, I'm not opposed to the saxophone!"

"Head is my favorite film that stars a musical artist, by some degree. And yes, that includes the brilliant A Hard Day’s Night. However, the Monkees’ triumph of a movie is a Pyrrhic victory, because Head accelerated their demise, as it sees Dolenz, Nesmith, Tork, and Jones push the self-destruct button. Directed by Bob Rafelson and cowritten by Jack Nicholson, the movie shows the Monkees tearing down their wholesome network-TV, pre–Fab Four image with wild style. Much has been read into this stream-of-consciousness movie, with its overlapping dream sequences, surreal song numbers, and drug-influenced chaos. The simplest way of describing it is this: the Monkees are sick of being on their network show and attempt to break out of the studio lot, literally and figuratively. There are several scenes where the Monkees are trapped in a box, a live number where they are revealed to be plastic mannequins, and bookending sequences where the members commit suicide. So basically, the Monkees want out. There have been some claims by the Monkees since the film came out that this message was projected onto it by Rafelson and Nicholson, but the script was clearly born of a very real frustration with their image. The movie bombed in 1968, because not many Monkees fans wanted to know that their idols had painted-on smiles. What remains is a gem of rock music cinema, with great songs and images throughout. Plus, as depressing as the theme of entrapment is, it’s frequently very funny. I got to interview Dolenz about it at a New Beverly Q&A once. A young audience member quizzed him on the deeper themes, and he just replied, “Man, I was twenty-three . . .”"