"The first Damned record is a classic. These were some of our influences and bands that never really got a wider appeal and should have. Rat Scabies was on that record and was like a rebirth of Keith Moon, Brian James’ guitar playing was second to none, suddenly punk rock had our own Eddie Van Halen - sort of [laughs]. Just a shredder. Then there was Captain Sensible and Dave Vanian... everyone was a unique character, not just personally but as a player. I don’t think anybody could have beaten the Damned at that point in their carer. It was short-lived but maybe it was too ferocious to last with that line-up. After we did that record I was playing a gig in ‘94 with Steve Jones, we were playing the Viper Room every Monday night as the Neurotic Outsiders and Rat Scabies came to one of the gigs. Steve introduced us and Rat said, ""thanks for covering that song, I got the biggest publishing cheque I ever got"". But I didn’t know what to say, I was terrified of The Damned man, these are my heroes. I mean it was Rat Scabies, what the hell do you say to Rat Scabies?"

"We have to put a Stones record in there too for good measure. The times I drove down to LA in ‘84 I probably listened to that song 75 times - probably a lot more actually - on my little ghetto blaster in my car. It was kind of the soundtrack to my life that year, again it was another record that got me through a big sea change in my life. There are lots of good Rolling Stones records but that one was given to me at the right time in my life. Playing with them was a big thing of course and we were really built up way beyond what we wanted to be. I was just happy to be opening for The Rolling Stones in any way at all, but someone in the LA Times wrote it up and had a picture of us like we were going to be the next Rolling Stones. It was ‘88 or ’89, we were young guys and how do you handle that? Imagine that pressure, if you’re 24 years old you just want it to go away. And I was thinking, ""I hope none of the guys from the Stones see this article saying we’re going to be the next Rolling Stones…""

"My third and final pick is “Grandma,” a comedy about a grandmother and her granddaughter. Her granddaughter is pregnant, she wants to have an abortion. And it’s this very low-key, good-humored… it’s not a movie that tries to be about too much. It’s just about these characters and their situation. The grandmother is played by Lily Tomlin, and [in] this performance she plays this feminist poet and writer who’s just a wonderfully cranky, uncompromising woman. I don’t know, if that is not a great performance, I don’t know what is. And it’s a very underplayed, very controlled performance. The Oscars like to award sort of big, emotional, weeping-and-fist-pounding moments of acting, and there’s none of that in “Grandma.” It’s just such a delight. If I were to give the Oscars advice, first thing I would say is: just lighten up. You know, there’s a lot of really great movies that are funny. And I don’t even wanna get started on the Foreign Language Film category, which is such a mess. The one-film-per-country-rule… Just find the movies from all over the world that are most exciting and most original and find a way to give those some prizes."