"I love this movie and its revisionist style and its radical politics, but most importantly there is no more punk-rock move in cinema history than having the opening credits be the checks that you’re writing to the cast and crew. Godard—the rich-kid film nerd to end all rich-kid film nerds—gets the machinations of the motion picture “industry” better than any of us. Contempt is masterful, Weekend is a lark, Tout va bien burns everything to the ground."

"I’m tempted to say Arrival, because I used to stare at the album cover as a kid, but Voulez-Vous was sort of my introduction to proper French. The arrangements on the record are great, and Does Your Mother Know is a fantastic rock song. That riff could have easily been on a T. Rex record. “They were a little ahead of the curve. This record is right before a lot of people started combining disco and rock, and I think ABBA did it rather inadvertently. Beautiful songs, incredible production. Anybody who puts down ABBA is just plain mad. The songs are light and bouncy, but if you listen to the lyrics, there’s a lot of sadness there. Pretty interesting."

"I remember hearing ‘African Bombaataa’ by Planet Rock and at the time time I was way into breakdancing and that was my whole life at maybe 9/10 years old. But those sounds for those records were so futuristic and I was way in into robots as a kid and science fiction and that music completely sounded like it was from another planet. And at that point I knew I wanted to make and create music and do something futuristic of that sort. Obviously I took another path or different style to the music we ended up creating as my job but even to this day electronic music I’m still very passionate about."

"1977. I'm a sixteen-year-old kid and glam rock has died. Disco has come in but this saved my life. Lennon once said to Bowie that glam rock was just 'rock & roll with lipstck' and if that's the case then punk was glam without the musicianship. It certainly wasn't disco and it sure as fuck wasn't overblown proggy stuff. They blew Yes and Genesis and all that stuff out of the water. They took us back to the three minute pop song. Punk songs were short and sweet. That first Clash record was amazing. There was a huge amount of melody on that record that nobody ever takes any notice of. Mick Jones was a huge Mott the Hoople fan - he was a member of the Sea Divers [the Mott fan club] and used to follow them around the country. 'Janie Jones' is brilliant; their version of 'I Fought The Law' is just outstanding, the best ever recorded. They might have written better songs on London Calling but, as an album, this was a breath of fresh air amongst the 70s stuff. I was still playing Diamond Dogs and Ziggy but this was like a newer version. When punk started kicking off it was brilliant, because they all came to Sheffield - more so than the glam bands. I could actually go and see them. I saw the Clash, the Ramones, Slaughter and the Dogs, Eddie and the Hotrods, Dr Feelgood - that whole intersection with pub rock. It was a lifesaver."

"I was reading about Ian Dury a few years ago. I'd heard his music before and I must confess, I wasn't that impressed. I found him to be a captivating figure, but the music was just too 1979 funky pub-rock. I didn't relate to it. But I wanted to read about him and then I discovered he had a son named Baxter who's a musician. Since then, I've probably listened to Happy Soup more than any record in the past few years – maybe a thousand times. I've had requests from my wife to please put on a different fucking record. All my five kids know the whole thing by heart because I got obsessed with it. It's starting to get a bit insanity-inducing. I still listen to music like a little kid: I discover something, I like it, and that's all I listen to for a while."

"I have an argument with people who say that the punk scene changed their lives. Nearly everyone I speak to says that the Clash were the most exciting and the most important group of the era. But without the Sex Pistols there wouldn't have been any Clash: end of story. And people claim that Chris Spedding played on the album [as uncredited session musician], but really it was Steve Jones, and he is one of the great rock & roll guitarists. And Lydon was streets ahead of everyone else. The Clash made great pop records and the Sex Pistols were a great punk group. And for me this is year zero, you can go back to the Stooges if you like but if you were a kid waiting for someone to kick against bands that I have listed like Genesis, then the Sex Pistols were it. They lit the touch paper. It's a cliché but it's true."

"I got that record from my brother-in-law for Christmas - we have this huge family and so we were picking names from a hat and whoever you got the name of you bought a present for. My brother-in-law was this cool fucking dude who listened to college radio and he got me that first Clash record and I got to see them later that year so I guess it was Christmas 1978. We had the US version, it was just called The Clash with the green cover – you knew that if you were American, 'cos we were like, ""we cant get the real fucking English version"" - I mean they had it on import, but it was so expensive. I don’t know what my musical life would have been like if I didn’t get to see that gig. It was really exotic for that band to come and play Seattle. The whole Seattle community was there and it was probably only 200 people but it felt like everybody in the world was there. I remember there was this wooden barrier and this security guy in front of the pit who didn’t know how to deal with a punk rock audience, and he just decked this kid and broke his nose and The Clash just stopped the gig. And Paul Simonon or someone grabbed an axe and broke down the barrier! And I remember Joe Strummer saying, ""there’s no difference between us and you guys, these barriers and shit are separating us"", and it suddenly dawned on me. They were totally against the whole rock star thing, like there’s not us and there’s you, it was like we were all in this together. I guess I’d be lying if I said in the nineties I didn’t have… not ‘punk rock guilt’ exactly, but there would be a lot of bands that came up, like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, there were guys who were in the punk rock scene and this was what was next, and as a young dude you feel a little guilty when you’re suddenly selling millions of records. But no-one sold their soul or changed their fucking tune, this was what evolved out of punk rock. Looking back it was a natural progression. Guns was a mix of a lot of different input, punk rock, seventies rock, and it was about doing something different and maybe that’s what punk rock sounded like at that point, I don’t know (laughs). I mean Guns was as DIY as it got, we would hitchhike 1,200 miles to get to a gig but we just went to the next level in getting a major label deal, that was the big change. But I took that ethic with me that Strummer had said. I don’t know any different, I’m honoured to be playing gigs and I’ve always paid tribute to that way of thinking."