"‘Autonomy’ was a massive wakeup call for me. I bought the album the day it came out, I got the bus after school and it was in a silver plastic bag. When I got home and put it on I knew the singles, but when I got to ‘Autonomy’ it was genuinely a new kind of rock music. “There’s no way I can ever separate the fact that I was aware it was from my town. If it had been from Düsseldorf I would have been mind blown, but I was more mind blown it was from Manchester, because it could have been from Düsseldorf. I knew it couldn’t have been from Los Angeles and sounded like The Doobie Brothers, Fleetwood Mac or Jackson Browne and knowing it now I don’t think it could have come from London. “London at that time was very dominated by the sound of The Clash and The Pistols and in spite of what people like to say it was quite testosteroney and straight, certainly compared to the Buzzcocks and Magazine. Wire were a different matter, they had an arch femininity and an intellectual aspect about them, but Buzzcocks sounded like my environment, in much the same way Joy Division were going to a year later, the way The Smiths did a few years after that and the way The Fall did. “I might have been projecting, but when I put it all together it sounded so modern and so Manchester and it gave me an insight into my city, modern Manchester. I was always looking for clues, for a key to pick up, to open and go through the next door as a musician and a thinker and I probably still am, that’s the best way I can describe it. ‘Autonomy’ was like a key, it was ‘This riff is very, very deliberate, it’s not bluesy, it’s very bold and it doesn’t sound anything like classic rock.’ It’s really in your face, the words are very clever and sang in quite an effeminate, challenging vocal. I love The Clash but to me it was better than ‘White Riot’, it was this cross between aggression and arty. “The punks I’d see around Manchester personified that, they looked like little thugs and they were very effeminate, so again it’s that thing about the feminisation of rock music. I hadn’t realised that actually, but almost everything I’ve mentioned has got a non-testosterone aspect to it. That was quite a moment and being that age, fourteen, fifteen, you’re so fearless and open to being free, well I was anyway, I was looking for things to give me juice to fire that fearlessness up. I think you see through bullshit really well when you’re that age, when you get older you think too much!"