"This goes up to the Chicago stuff. When all the Mississippi guys made it up to Chicagoland, the Chess Brothers started picking them up and made it possible for them to record some stunning material. “There’s so much good stuff here that I don’t even know where to begin. Louisiana Blues, Rollin’ And Tumblin’, Long Distance Call, I Can’t Be Satisfied – all of these recordings were turning points in that, once electricity entered the picture, bands with three and four people in them could do battle with Duke Ellington and Count Basie and 10-piece horn sections. “Muddy Waters had a very distinctive guitar tone. When he played a Gibson Les Paul goldtop, you could really identify the sound, and you knew who it was. Compared to BB or Freddy or Albert, his playing might not have been so fanciful, but his licks were stinging and ferocious. And he laid down a lot of Delta-based slide guitar, too. Just because he was in Chicago, he didn’t leave his humble beginnings behind."

"Little Walter was a cool character. He had attitude, skill…the whole act, he had it down. He could play guitar, but he was a master of the harmonica. Basically, he wanted to be the stand-in for a four or five-piece horn section. People weren’t used to seeing a guy cup a microphone around a harmonica, crank it up and just blast off on these wild solos. He was practically his own band – he was certainly loud enough. As well as his skills on the harp, Little Walter became a fine singer. In fact, he used to be in Muddy Waters' band until he struck out to find success on his own. And he got it, too: His first big hit was a song called Juke, and it’s pretty incredible. You listen to eight or 10 Little Walter songs and you’ll probably have to scrape yourself off the floor or the ceiling, depending on which way the music sent you. This big ol’ box set, I can’t imagine what it would do to people hearing Little Walter for the first time. You might need some intermissions between discs just to get your senses back in working order."

"I wanted to mention this record because it’s almost taken for granted in David Bowie’s canon as just ‘there’s another great Bowie track’, yet it gets overlooked by something like ‘Let’s Dance’ or ‘Heroes.’ “If this came out now I don’t think it’d have any chance on mainstream radio and I think that’s because - and this might be incredibly subjective - he does this amazing thing where he manages to be completely remote whilst leading this band. It’s a really genius performance, the way he pitches his vocal and his persona, it’s cold and remote, but yet really sexy and it’s got no earnestness in it whatsoever. It’s not inciting you to get up and rock like ‘Jailhouse Rock’ or any of the Elvis Presley records, which is someone wanting to dance with you or encouraging you to do that. “To use an obvious comparison about Bowie, this has a really alien position because the voice is so cold, but it’s perfectly Rock and Roll. And it’s really white I think, probably because I can picture him in my mind when it came out and you’d never seen anyone more white, but it’s also as low down and Rock and Roll as any of the blues records that came out. It’s interesting, it’s got that sexuality in it. “I was about ten when it was released and to me and a bunch of kids experiencing it then it was so modern, because of what Bowie’s doing on top of what is essentially a Yardbirds or a Muddy Waters riff and using ‘The Jean Genie’, which back then was such a hip kind of slang. It’s a play on Jean Genet and he’s describing bits he’d picked up from Iggy, but in the early 70s’ everything was ‘Ziggy’, ‘Iggy’, ‘Genie’ and people were called ‘Mick’ and ‘Stevie.’ “There was a very urban, street Rock and Roll that was quite illicit; the threat of drugs, danger, confused sexuality and super-androgyny and the character he’s singing about personifies that in the mind, which leads me to Iggy."