"I first heard him at about 16, and listening to him was like just doing really good drugs, it was like smoking [laughs]... I felt very moved by his music and when I did, it felt like it was just for me, because it seemed like no-one had ever heard of him. No-one really knew of him that well until - I'd often put his record on and blow people's minds with it. I'm not sure what I meant by it being ""personal"" - it sounds like a good way of not talking about it! - I don't want to repeat myself, but listening to it, I never get bored. If we want to get into the sound of a record, there's some pretty innovative sounds in there, in a way. I think it was quite an adventurous record, really, for a supposed folk singer and I find his songs very moving. The first song I ever sang was 'Don't Want To Know ‘Bout Evil', I did a version with William Orbit, and then one of the first gigs I ever did was supporting John Martyn. I think it was at Queen Elizabeth Hall - I was so happy, and running around with bottles of champagne and was like ""no! He's not drinking them!"" He was pretty grumpy, but it seemed to me had different states of mind - this time, he was in a different place."

"There is certainly a rasp to my voice [LAUGHS]. It's not quite as bad as Bonnie Tyler's but it is raspy. Rod Stewart wasn't a big influence on me as a singer though. I don't really sound like anybody. In the same way that Ozzy doesn't sound like anybody or Alice Cooper doesn't sound like anybody. You get these boyband singers now that are all very similar. Even in the old days, you could swap round some of the Motown singers and you wouldn't really know the difference. Singer wise, I loved Mark Bolan; Noddy Holder; David Bowie; Alex Harvey; Russell Mael; Steve Harley; Brian Ferry; Sammy Hagar; Phil Lynott. All that lot go into a bucket but I still don't sound like any of them [LAUGHS]. Mutt Lange was a huge influence on my singing: he can play anything, do anything. He was pushing and pushing. I remember the first time I ever met Lou Gram from Foreigner. He said: 'tell me, did Mutt make you feel like you couldn't sing either?' and this was fucking Lou Gram, right? He'd make you do it again and again. He would push and push until you'd be right on the edge of losing it. Sometimes that worked and sometimes you felt like your spirit was being destroyed. Physically, you're going into spaces in your head and your chest cavity that you've never been. But he would've done it with anybody: look what he did with Brian Johnson, he put him through the bloody ringer with Back In Black but look what he got out of it. And that's why I don't complain. Rod Stewart was the first album I ever bought with my pocket money. The version of 'I'm Losing You' is just genius but my 'in' to that record, as it were, was 'Maggie May' because it was all over the radio at the time. It was rock but it was pop rock: it's not been influential in terms of how we sound but I absolutely love it."

"I just love Mean Streets, period. I grew up in my own version of that. Scorsese is a hero of mine. The movie’s really about him, you know, as a filmmaker — you watch Harvey’s performance when he goes to the church and he’s there on his knees in his version of praying, and you hear the voice-over. What’s amazing about that movie is — now that I’ve met Scorsese a few times — I can see that he was sort of in that world. He’s said it a few times: “I wasn’t sure if I was gonna become a priest or a gangster.” [Laughs] And when you see the movie, you see him, and you get that. You see Harvey’s character is a little bit of a priest, he’s trying to be a good guy but he’s in a world of mobsters and he needs to be accepted by that world. I love the elements that Scorsese captured. I love, again, that sort of brave filmmaking — they didn’t have any money to do a parade, but he just captured that ceremony, you know. They put cameras on the roof and shot down. They put you in the middle of a world and you felt like you were really in it. And De Niro, of course, is genius. It’s ridiculous how good he is. I could go on and on about why I love those movies, as far as technically, and performance-wise — but that’s the basic essence."

"Another film is Apocalypse Now, which I’m sure every male moron you’ve ever interviewed has put in his top five. But the reason I put it in my top five is because Ian MacKaye, my best friend, and I went to go see it, first run, and we walked out not understanding what we had seen. But we walked home with, like, smoke coming out of our ears. And it’s one of those, where you’re young with no car, you get used to walking — like, “it’s only four miles each way.” And you’re so young and so stupid you just do it. Just getting snowed on. No problem. It was one of those massive walks back to our neighborhood and we just kinda walked home in shocked silence. We were, in a way, devastated, and neither one of us could tell you what that film was about. “Was it about the war?” “I guess.” So we went back to see it again later, and we were like 18 or 17. And maybe other 17-year-olds could’ve articulated it, but for Ian and I, we loved it but we were just kinda devastated by it. As I grew older, now I’m a twenty-something, and I’m watching once a year. And I start to understand it when I start to understand the Vietnam War differently. I’m starting to understand that conflict a little more as a young adult. Then I start reading into the characters more, and the more I see it, one day I feel like I’m Willard, Martin Sheen’s character. And one day I feel like I’m Kurtz, Brando’s character. And then I join Black Flag and our tours — our van was like PBR Street Gang. The highway was the Nung river. We would just go into these hairy situations. I’ll never forget one night, I’m in the back of our equipment truck with the backdoor kinda open, me and one of the roadies, and we’re looking at the lights of some harbor in Florida and I looked at him and said, “This sure enough is a bizarre sight in the middle of all this s—,” as Clean says when they’re going into that crazy kinda nightclub, DMZ area where Bill Graham comes out and does his amazing scene. And, Apocalypse Now lines from the film became patter between me and a Black Flag roadie, and then between members of the Rollins band, where we would speak in Apocalypse Now. When we’d go into a place where everything was screwed up I’d say, “Chris, did you find the monitor guy?” and he’d say, “No, there’s no f—ing CO here,” which is from Apocalypse Now, which means there’s nobody in charge; this place is a wreck. So, as I got older — I’m 55 now — that film is still relevant to me. And it still speaks to me on a lot of levels. Like when Kurtz says to Willard, “It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means… you must make a friend of horror.” And I never really understood that line until I was involved in a murder [the murder of Joe Cole], where I was almost killed and my friend was killed. I became full of horror. And once you get that, you get it. And so I’ll never think of that line the same way again, because it so describes what happened to me. I can’t describe what that was like to you. I can describe it but it’s gonna fall short. Unless that’s happened to you, you don’t understand what I’m telling you. You’ll only understand it in a journalistic way. Oh, right, OK, something bad happened. You don’t know the half of it, ’cause I can’t articulate it to you, and you can’t read me. And it’s what happened to all these dudes. These Vietnam vets, Iraq and Afghanistan. They come home and no one can read them. Which is shown so beautifully in The Hurt Locker. When the guy goes home and he’s preparing the meal with his wife, like yeah, “This guy got blown up.” And she’s like “Uh-Huh, cut the carrots.” There’s a complete disconnect. And so what Apocalypse Now — I finally figured it out — it’s just about insanity, which is nothing but what war is. It’s just a bunch of people being completely insane. And it captures the insanity of human conflict perfectly. It could’ve been any war."

"Glory. Mr. Ed Zwick. I believe the original story was more concentrated on the officers, and what Ed seemed to find was the movie — and I love when that happens, when he lets the movie dictate how he should cut it or lets the movie dictate how he should roll it out — and it became about those soldiers. And he didn’t seem to manipulate any of the greatness that was going on in that film. He wasn’t arrogant about having an understanding of the culture. He seemed to appreciate it and understand. They’re bringing these actors that are bringing out the culture and the stuff that I could never anticipate, I could never prepare for, that was not on the page. It was transformative. The whole thing was. It was not only a history lesson, it was a meaningful time in the business of diversity and seeing characters that look like me — you know, that they were my color — in the business at the time have that sort of platform to embrace the inner workings, from the slave trade to the first soldiers, the emancipated men. I felt like that was such an important film. I knew every line for every character. I mean, I lived that movie. It was my upbringing. That was my school, basically. I literally knew every line. From Robert Gould Shaw to Frederick Douglass’ one scene. I knew that line too. It was kind of crazy. I wanted a blue suit for Christmas, and I broke the VHS tape and I wanted a new VHS tape for Christmas, too. And also the score. Hearing that score with those black faces — you see it in Barry Jenkins’ films as well. I just felt like Ed Zwick deserved more credit than he got. He should get more recognition. He made, I think, a perfect film, too. I think it’s a perfect film."