"They were very theatrical. Alex Harvey was 40 something, he was an old guy. And - at the time - that was ancient for rock n roll. He won the Scottish Tommy Steele competition in 1957. The prize? Meeting Tommy Steele! What a bizarre business. That was two years before I was born and he must have been in his late teens/early 20s by then. To be in your early 40s and starting out was unheard of. David Bowie and Alex Harvey knew each other, actually: they bonded over a shared love of Jacques Brel. 'Faith Healer' is one of the best things that ever came out of the 70s. And the end triplet of 'Last Of The Teenage Idols' – which is about the competition that he won. That was amazing. I loved his voice: he screamed his way through life. His version of 'Crazy Horses' is hilarious. He did a song called 'There's No Lights on the Xmas Tree Mother… They're Burning Big Louis Tonight'. It was about a guy in the electric chair who takes all the power off the grid on the night of his death. Nobody in this little town in America gets the Xmas lights. What a brilliant idea for a song. It was theatrics and bravado. Alex Harvey was off kilter - it wasn't like The Sweet or Mud, he was musically brilliant."

"I grew up with the Little House characters - I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder's books as a kid. Little House in the Big Woods is written for a younger child, and as you mature, the books do too. I was confused when my daughter did not like them at all. -- in Redbookmag.com I started reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series when I was 8. The drama of the series was enhanced by the fact that I knew these were true stories – the hardships and pleasures of the pioneer life she described had actually happened to a little girl, and not only had she survived it, but she had grown up to write about it too. The most emotionally wrenching and enthralling of the series was “The Long Winter,” a depiction of the winter her family endured in 1880-81 while they were living in South Dakota. The winter blizzards lasted seven long months, during which the railroads stopped running to their town, and her family was trapped inside their house, subsisting on a very meager diet of potatoes and brown bread. I can still remember the passages where Ingalls described twisting hay into sticks all day for fuel for the fire, and her worry that they would finally run out of hay and they would freeze to death. It kind of made my pre-adolescent worries pale by comparison."