"""When I started Sleaford Mods I started to explore my childhood influences, like The Meteors. I was 13 in 1983, but it was a good period of music. Socially it was not very good, but creatively it was great. I tried to dress up, I was a bit of a scooter boy. Pilot jacket, American lightweight camouflage trousers, leather jacket, crows nest haircut that didn't look very good, but you know, that kind of thing. It made a big impression on me, but I didn't experiment with these ideas until Sleaford Mods really, when I found my natural voice. I can sing, but singing is a really difficult thing. I can sing very well and I did that for so many years but it's not my real voice. When I started Sleaford it was my own voice and I married perfectly to that kind of thing. People these days are like, ""Oh you sound like John Lydon,"" well, I don't mean to sound like John Lydon, if there's echoes of that, it's just the way I speak, you know."""

"I was only nine years old in 1976 so I wasn't down the front at the 100 Club, I was still watching Doctor Who. Like everything in those days it probably filtered through slowly to Haywards Heath Market. It was the first record I bought. It was shockingly brilliant, and is one of those records that if you played it in 200 years time it would still sound like that. I think that they perfectly defined their own genre. They were the ultimate punk band. The other so-called punk bands to me sound like a parody of the Sex Pistols. It's a lot to do with John Lydon, he's a huge hero of mine. I was going to have a PiL record in here but I thought you can't have two records by the same person. I saw PiL play recently, and it's the first time I've ever done this, but I went to John Lydon's dressing room door to thank him for everything, but he was asleep. To have created the Sex Pistols was an amazing thing in itself, and then to go and create a new band that was just as groundbreaking in such a different way was unbelievable. John Lennon didn't do that. Jim Morrison didn't do that."

"It's another strange thing; you had to keep some records as secrets on the punk scene, but John Lydon was into [founding member of Van der Graaf Generator] Peter Hammill. There's an idea that people would hide their Genesis records and get out The Damned ones if people came round. I didn't hide mine, although I didn't play them to Ian when he came round. They're a funny band, Van der Graaf Generator. At the time, with Pawn Hearts, all of your mates would say: "Ooh, there's a track that's three days long… it's pixie stuff". But 'A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers' is completely overblown, like a nightmare with saxophones. I suppose it's the ultimate prog-rock album: it's really overblown, but still of the terrifying. I really like Peter Hammill. He's another guy who's really unique - he has a really individual way of singing, and it's very raw."

"I'd heard of Andy Warhol, but I'd never heard The Velvet Underground until David Bowie talked about them in interviews in the NME, and of course Transformer. I'd rather talk about Transformer than the banana album actually, because Transformer sums up the era. I do believe that Mick Ronson was very instrumental - like a classically trained musician as well as a gorgeous rock god lead guitarist. His arrangement abilities for both Ziggy Stardust and Transformer have not been fully recognised in the history of pop music. I don't think David would've broke through without that. I remember dancing to 'Vicious' in a nightclub called Masquerade in Liverpool - a really eccentric gay bar full of diesel dykes, prostitutes and older gay men with dyed black hair and toupees. It was a strange netherworld hidden up a back alley that embraced a bunch of freaks of my generation like Pete Burns and me, Jane Casey, who wore too much make-up. That was the thing about a gay club, you were safe almost in there. A strange refuge. I suppose in a way, punk kind of helped that. Absolutely. One minute you were queer on the street, the next minute you were a punk. It normalised that sort of behaviour really, you know; ""Oh, they're just punks"", and it was a diversion away from sexuality. Punk was strangely non-sexual. Even the main protagonist John Lydon had something of a 'neither here nor there' about him."