"I don’t mean this in a derogatory way, but Graham Oliver and Steve Dawson of Saxon were into the bluesy bands - simple but with a lot of groove. But me and Paul Quinn were into more muso bands like Genesis and King Crimson. That was the type of stuff we played, with more jamming and improvisation. As a bass player and singer, my goal was to play like Chris Squire. I used to try and learn the songs – it took me about six months to learn ‘Roundabout’. I‘ve talked to Rick Wakeman about Yes, and he said Jon Anderson would structure melodies like I do it. They would sit in a room and arrange things around the vocals, and we do that because it gives me more freedom to write. I could listen to this all day. NWOBHM bands liked Yes because the musicianship was great - it moves away from blues feel to a jazz feel. A lot of these guys were university trained, but we learned from listening to music. We knew nothing about music theory or scales, but prog rock really made you better as musicians when you learned to play it. It seemed unattainable because it was so good."

"This is another case of, "Where's my Radiohead gone?" Hearing Muse for the first time was like, "Holy shit, this is like Radiohead, but heavier, and more pop, but also darker as well", and I just absolutely fell for it, hook, line and sinker. I was at the perfect age, was just getting into actually being good at playing stuff, and Matt Bellamy was all over the place in terms of his musical talents, playing the piano and guitar, and stuff that teenagers love. Stuff that sounds flashy and complex and twiddly but is actually not. And the bass player! Fuck me, the basslines on the album! Bass players don't do that kind of stuff! He's the sort of main character in an awful lot of those songs. It was an absolute revelation. I was a bass player before I was anything else, and I remember thinking, "Holy shit that sounded ace"! They ripped up the rulebook in so many ways for rock music. It was so enjoyable as well. Every song had a real sense of performance and razzmatazz. Of course it's called Showbiz and it is a type of show. So I think, more than anything, that's probably what you would say about my band, particularly live - we're not subtle, it's over the top. Whether people like it or not, that's got into us now and it's hard to take a step back."

"I'd agree that they were ahead of their time, they were quite minimalist really. Minimal electronic music. When I heard the b-side of 'Electricity', which was a track called 'Almost', that was like hearing Simon & Garfunkel, only in an electronic world. The songs were really simple, there was heaps of emotion in that particular track. It was a record that everybody had in my group, and we all played it at parties and danced to it. I say 'dance', I am not Saturday Night Fever, I'm working on it. I'm trying to break the moonwalk at the moment. 'Electricity', I didn't know what it was about, it just sounded really really exciting. They were a prog rock band in the old days apparently. I was telling the keyboard player about my admiration for 'Almost' and he said, "Yeah that was one of our old prog rock songs, there were seven people in the band"."

"I don't think I can explain how significant that record was to me. And the more I travel through my life as a musician, the more I find myself coming back to it again and again. My mom had a giant stack of vinyl – mostly classical, with a few rock records. When I was seven or eight years old and started listening to music by myself, that album became the daily soundtrack to my life. I would ask someone to put the record player on for me and I would sit there with big headphones one, listening, and having the record flipped over again and again and again. I would put the music on and just stare at the cover for 45 minutes. The artwork was so important. Sgt Pepper's was full of lyrics I could understand, stories I could follow, music that just made complete sense to me. I understood all of it, and it took me into a world. I think that was the first time I really fell in love with a record. I loved 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' and 'She's Leaving Home', but one of my favourites was the opening track. What I really wanted – what I still want – was to feel like I was at some amazing happening. As a seven-year-old fantasising about being a rockstar, which I was just starting to do, every time I listened to that opening track, I imagined that somewhere there's this group of people in this psychedelic wonderland listening to the Beatles. I didn't have any clue who the Beatles were or what they meant, I didn't have any fucking context. I just knew that if there was a party, this was the one I wanted to be at."

"I remember buying the tape of this song. I must have killed that tape, I rewound it and rewound it. I think that was my first recognition of realising that I was in love with pop music and how it’s so addictive and how it made me feel. Even now, if I hear those opening bass notes I’m like ‘Fuck! It’s so good!’ It hit such a chord inside. “I think with ‘Without You’ and ‘It’s All Coming Back To Me Now’ they were me experiencing just the songs, but this was like ‘Oh my god, I love Britney’, I became obsessed with her as a pop star. The song definitely has the power of attraction and falling in love, being able to repeat, repeat, repeat and it’s such a good melody, but also Britney was an icon from day one. I felt like I just wanted to be like her. “I would watch the music video over and over on TV and that’s when I fell in love with pop music as a thing. I didn’t even know what it was, but I knew I wanted to be part of it. I liked the simple production back then too, it was so non-aggressive. I find a lot of the production in pop so aggressive now, whereas Britney was just so fucking pure, it was easy on the ears and I wanted to hear it over and over. “Britney takes me right back, like I can feel, I can see, I’m in the back of my mum’s car, I’m looking at the tape player, hitting rewind. I can see that and I’m like a zombie. I’m here going… [tape rewind sounds]. If someone puts on '...Baby One More Time' I’m ‘Oh god, turn it up! I have the same love for it each time, it’s amazing."

"It was 1991/2 when the Spin Doctors had their relatively brief moment of huge fame, and their first album went triple platinum. I actually first saw them on The David Letterman Show in the early days of that, and was intrigued by the bouncy, very New York, educated and musicianly sound of the band, who were clearly great players. They were very much a product of that era when very good, very musically aware, very elegant musicians got together to make very direct rock music in a way that sounded so fresh and unlike the other stuff that was going on. They were musos, not a bunch of kids in a garage. They were guys who really knew about time signatures, rhythms and arrangements and had great ability with their instruments. And the singer, Chris Barron, brought a freshness in delivery that worked extremely well on The David Letterman Show and in the few videos they did at the time. I actually went to see them live in the UK and I met them, at the Wolverhampton Civic Hall or somewhere. The guitar player was a very charming guy, a bit of a fan and very pleased I came to the gig and went backstage to say hi, whereas the bass player and drummer gave me the cold shoulder, as if I was from a previous generation, like an earlier episode of Star Trek. For basically a three-piece with a singer they made a very cohesive noise."