"The British Invasion of the sixties fascinates me, as do the glitter rock and prog rock movements that followed. A Hard Day’s Night is my all-time favorite film, and the music made between 1964 and 1974 has remained my favorite. Most of that music is filled with power, liberation, and joy. But right in the middle of that ten-year period was this terrible event that seems to body-slam the “peace and love” vibe that preceded it. The Rolling Stones had recently lost founding member and icon Brian Jones and were moving on. Some genius decides to hire Hells Angels (with beer) for security at their concert at the Altamont Speedway, which results in the stabbing death of a concertgoer. It’s amazing that these events all come together in this eerie and compelling document. This film details the exact moment of “the end of an era.” Chilling."

"It's another strange thing; you had to keep some records as secrets on the punk scene, but John Lydon was into [founding member of Van der Graaf Generator] Peter Hammill. There's an idea that people would hide their Genesis records and get out The Damned ones if people came round. I didn't hide mine, although I didn't play them to Ian when he came round. They're a funny band, Van der Graaf Generator. At the time, with Pawn Hearts, all of your mates would say: "Ooh, there's a track that's three days long… it's pixie stuff". But 'A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers' is completely overblown, like a nightmare with saxophones. I suppose it's the ultimate prog-rock album: it's really overblown, but still of the terrifying. I really like Peter Hammill. He's another guy who's really unique - he has a really individual way of singing, and it's very raw."

"I had a friend at school that was just as obsessive about music as I was. He was a huge New Order fan. He lent me a really badly taped cassette of Script Of The Bridge. At first I thought it was too dangerously close to prog rock. Around that time, I think I'd just gone to sixth form… What was great about that was meeting people of a like mind. But the place where I came from was a typical Northern small town. I think the idea was probably dawning that there was nothing there and I didn't really belong. I was stuck in my own world with no outlet for it. I spent a lot of time just wandering around and thinking about stuff, and that was the soundtrack to it really. Pissing it down in the North on dark evenings. It sounds like rain in the north-west to me now. I dunno what's good about that."

"If you're listening to prog like Gong then you're going to bump into Magma. They make their own language on their records, so we made our own words for Magma albums. A number of Magma albums would pop up in various friends' record collection, and each one was quite different. On Üdü Wüdü there's an 18-minute track called 'De Futura', which is like a suite and it moves to different tempos and it's got all these cross rhythms in it; it's an overwhelmingly transcendent record. There was a rock disco that we used to go to in Manchester in the 70s and you could take your own records and we used to take this record. You'd see these rock fans freaking out to it. It was a curious time in Manchester because you had the punk thing, but all these other oddball things like Magma and Earth, Wind And Fire were standing beside each other. It wasn't as tribal as it's been made it out to be. You'd go up to a free festival in Rochdale that was called the Deeply Vale festival and all these subcultures would be represented there, because all of the sub-cultures would be big enough to stand on their own two feet. But at this disco in Manchester, you'd hear Bowie and Roxy Music, and Magma, probably some Genesis and some Sex Pistols."