"""It’s just amazing. I’ve been watching all of the Maysles Brothers‘ films and I’m really into their approach, which they called “direct cinema”, and the whole school that came out of DA Pennebaker, Robert Drew and so on. I love the whole idea that life can be as dramatic as fiction. It’s very different than reality television, because that’s very manipulated. The Maysles’ approach is minimal interaction and being as observational as possible. Gimme Shelter has such drama, and it’s so well-done. As are all of their films. I also love Salesman, which also proves that their philosophy can really work, because it just has these real Bible salesmen. But to me it has as much drama and tension as Arthur Miller or Eugene O’Neill – it’s like the Death of a Salesman and The Iceman Cometh all rolled together – but it’s real! I just can’t get enough of it."""

"I always like when I hear something that I think is trend–setting. I believe that he’s inspired. I’m listening with the same ears that I listen to Stravinsky, Ligeti and Zappa with. What I’m hearing is someone with the ability to layer timbres and sounds on an electronic field in the same way that Stravinsky did as an orchestrator. My kids come home with all this dubstep stuff and I go to raves occasionally –not too much but I’ve been to a few, and a lot of that music is emulating everything else that’s around and it’s really good but it becomes insipid because it lacks a certain depth of vision. But listening to Skrillex I hear the layered quality of it although it isn’t exactly my favorite style of music. Things have dynamics, things have places bearing in mind what’s going on around them so that it doesn’t all just sound like a mess and I’m very impressed with it."

"A real teenage classic, very American rock album. I don’t know much about the band but I loved ‘Blister in the Sun’ and ended up getting the album taped off someone. I was into this at the same time as the Cure stuff and I just used to play it all the time. If I ever hear a song from this album randomly, I can just start joining in with all the lyrics; it’s imprinted on my brain. I remember thinking that a song like ‘Add It Up’ was really sophisticated and kind of had a whole story to it, which definitely influenced my own songwriting. It’s full of great songs, and there’s an incredible song at the end of the album ‘Good Feeling’ that is kind of like a great ballad Lou Reed never wrote."

"It's horribly sexist. It's almost like he hates women. I'm assuming he's grown up now and that's changed, but I wouldn't like to ask him. But you really get the feeling of how they struggled, and how they kept believing in themselves, and that's the great thing about it. He moved from Indiana, which must have been a fucking shit-hole. He gets to LA and is attacked in the bus station. It freaks him out. He jumps from one band to another, and that's how it should be. Nobody does that anymore, but it really influenced me. That's why I kept going. You meet these people and bands at festivals, and they've just come out of University, and you think, 'for fuck's sake!' You just want people to live it. And this song gives that out."

"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."

"Not so much for the guitar work, but what’s represented on this collection is a real tight, small band. Wolf’s nickname was appropriate because he actually sounded like a wild animal when he sang. What an outrageous, maniacal voice! He could’ve been a star of those old Wolfman movies and they wouldn’t have needed any special effects. “He played great harmonica, and he could certainly get with it on the guitar. He had a mystique that came through on record. He could be overwhelming and scary. Not many artists can do that. So I’d call him one of the true originals of the blues. I love this collection. Just to have one big box set that encompasses something like ten different recordings, that’s pretty special."