"This isn’t exactly a studio release. It’s a live release from the very first two shows that Bruce did in England, recorded on November 18, 1975 at the Hammersmith Odeon in London. In attendance was Joe Strummer, Pete Townshend, and Peter Gabriel, to name a few. At this single concert, Joe decided he’d play a Fender Telecaster from then on, Peter Gabriel decided he’d leave Genesis and go solo, and Pete Townshend made a request for “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City"" (to which you can clearly hear Bruce say, “This is for Pete” in his thick-as-mud Jersey Shore accent). All of this at one show. All because Bruce and the band were on absolute fire on this night. It’s the single best concert I’ve ever heard in my life. So when someone says to me, “Bruce? The guy with the flag and his butt on the cover of that record from the '80?” I reply, “Yes. That Bruce, and this punk rocker too.” Start here."

"More than any other band, the Who put that thing in me that made me who I am now, and this documentary told their story in a way that really zapped me. That connection you see between Pete Townshend and Keith Moon: you rarely see people get so possessed by their music, their energy and connection to each other. Then there’s Roger Daltrey being this flawless singer, an angel, in the chaos of it all. This documentary shows how much of the band’s exuberance is in their music, and when we’re watching their performances being constructed, I don’t see them being fakes – I see them making art out of their imaginations."

"That came out in 1988 when Ride was starting to happen. Mark and I had gone to art school, we’d met Steve, met Loz and - as a band - we got into a lot of American stuff like Dinosaur Jr., Screaming Trees and Sonic Youth. “Sonic Youth were on a real run of great albums there with EVOL and Sister but Daydream Nation was their peak and their sort of White Album for me. It changed my life and my playing with the open tunings, theguitar abuse with screwdrivers and slides, the long jams, the headspace and just the whole sprawl of it. It was like the Pete Townshend thing but taken a few steps further.”"

"That's pretty obvious. When I got turned onto it, I was like, "Okay, I'll pick up the guitar!" My favourite parts of it are the sonics. It's nothing like anyone's heard. Pete Townshend was like, "Alright, I quit the guitar." [laughs] That instrumental, 'Third Stone From The Sun', boy, how good is that? There's a video of Stevie Ray Vaughan - have you seen that? He did it fucking note-for-note! It's incredible! It's like, "Who the fuck is this guy?!" I just love it. I would say around 12 years old when I bought it. Then, I loved the poppier ones, like 'Fire' and obviously 'Purple Haze', had to learn that riff. I figured out what he was playing through a painful process. I'm not as fluid on guitar as my little brother, who can hear it once and just do it. That song has a chord, an E7#9 - I use it a lot! I use it on 'Tame': it's the one where everyone's hitting three chords and I'm hitting that chord and that's all I'm hitting. It's one of those chords that's either a question mark or an answer. It's very neutral, but more interesting than a major chord."

"I love the sound of ‘I Can’t Explain’. It’s my favourite and I love all those earlier ones. I used do them onstage with a group called The Nightriders and The Idle Race as well. ‘Pictures Of Lily’ and that kind of stuff. I used to love playing all those Who songs. They had something about them, The Who. It was like magic, the sound. And just watching Pete Townshend, he was always amazing. Did I ever catch them back in the day? Yeah! Not half! The loudest bloody thing I’ve ever heard in my life! I went to this place called Midnight City in Birmingham and it was quite a big room and everyone was waiting for them: ""wow! We’re gonna see The Who!"" and they struck up and went BLAAANG! and your earholes would go WOOOOM! and you couldn’t hear a fucking thing! Your hearing was gone! You know when your ears go inside out? And it’s like silence and you can’t hear fuck all for the next 10 minutes until your hearing starts coming back! And gradually you could start hearing them again. It was like a compressor, almost. It was really exciting to hear that when you’re a kid. And the tunes they played were so great. It was beautiful. Fantastic!"

"Well, speaking of authenticity, if you are going to be authentic then you really have to do it right. On the complete opposite side of the spectrum, what Bert Jansch was doing as a young man was deeply authentic and was genuinely very weird. Bert was a young person very much of his time but was making music that almost sounded ancient. From the guitar-playing point of view, he was innovating on an acoustic guitar in a way that was as powerful as Pete Townshend with electricity in The Who and as intricate as what Jimi Hendrix was doing with his space rock-blues. Vocally, Bert was almost punky and in the way he and his peers went about their lives, he was one of the very first lo-fi musicians - and that was 40 or 50 years ago. Bert was one of my few real heroes. I got to be friends with him for about ten years before he died. He was an amazing person and because we were friends I got to find out that the lifestyle choice of the folkies in Soho in the 60s was a very deliberate and radical. They made certain choices and the fact their music was not in the charts was no accident. In Bert's case, he was the king of the UK beats as a result of the beat poet influence on his generation. Also, he was tuned into the political climate of the time and things like the CND movement and the radical student scene. Bert was a lot more than an earnest folky with an acoustic guitar. I particularly like his second record. The album before it [1965's Bert Jansch] is more revered and held up by most journalists as being the seminal one, but I think the songs are better on It Don't Bother Me, particularly the title track. The fact that they were both recorded in a kitchen at his mate's house is another reason why it has never dated."

"There is something faintly off-putting about this book’s subtitle. We live in a world where the obsession with music’s past threatens to overwhelm its present, where the only music magazines that sell in any quantity deal in heritage rock, where virtually the only TV coverage of music comes via retrospective documentaries: the story of modern pop has been told and retold until it’s been reduced to a series of tired anecdotes and over-familiar landmarks. But Yeah Yeah Yeah’s brilliance lies in the personal, idiosyncratic route Bob Stanley takes through the past: for him, the modern pop era begins not with Elvis or “Rock Around the Clock”, but the release of Johnnie Ray’s 1954 album Live at the London Palladium, the first time a screaming teenage audience had been heard on record in the UK. He devotes more space to 1970 one-hit wonders Edison Lighthouse than to Led Zeppelin, delivers a withering verdict on some surprising sacred cows – Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Steely Dan – and is great at unearthing a forgotten quote that challenges what you might call the authorised version of events: at the height of the 1967’s Summer of Love, he finds the Who’s Pete Townshend not boggling at the new frontiers mapped out by psychedelia, but grumpily complaining that “people aren’t jiving in the listening boxes in record shops any more like we did to a Cliff Richard ‘newie’”. Stanley has a way of tackling well-worn topics – not least the Beatles – from unlikely angles, and of talking about artists you’ve never heard of with a contagious enthusiasm that makes hearing them seem like a matter of urgency. Best of all, he makes you laugh out loud while getting directly to the heart of the matter. The lugubrious late 70s output of Pink Floyd sounds like music made by people “who hated being themselves”. The punk-era Elvis Costello sang “like he was standing in a fridge”, and the experience of listening to novelty ska revivalists Bad Manners is “like being on a waltzer when you’ve had three pints and desperately need the toilet”. If you’ve ever heard them, you’ll know exactly what he means."