"In 1979, they’d finished recording their album, and ironically we ended up going into the same studio, TW in Fulham, just after them. And Elvis Costello had produced their album, and he’d left behind a few bits of tapes, out-takes. And we were trying to get the machine to play these fucking ten-second little strips of tape! All you’d hear was a snare sound or a bit of guitar, but we were trying to check out their sound! John Bradbury [Specials drummer] used to get these amazing rimshot sounds, and I remember asking him how, and he said “It’s the way I fucking play it, it wasn’t the way it was fucking recorded!” So, of course we were checking each other out. We played together a couple of times at the Nashville and somewhere else, and we were obviously in competition, very friendly competition. It was truly thrilling and exciting to know there was another band doing what we were doing. When they came to play at the Hope & Anchor, the pub we used to hang out in, it blew our minds to see these people who looked a bit like us and sounded a bit like us. They went off like a packet of crackers. I remember Neville Staple was blowing holes in the ceiling with a starter pistol! Then they stormed into ‘Gangsters’. I remember I wasn’t sure whether to feel jealous or fucking vindicated, that we were onto something after all. But they’d gone that bit further. It was turbo-charged ska, and we were still doing a bit of R&B, but The Specials gave us this revelation that the uptempo stuff was really fucking exciting. But that’s a great album, great songs, and the production is really clear. Not naïve, but not overly sophisticated."

"I listen to this record all the way through - even 'Moby Dick'. To me it encapsulates the Led Zeppelin sound, because the engineering on it is so magnificent. The fact that a four-piece band can sound so vast. Obviously there are great tracks on III and IV. But I feel that II is the most complete album. It's amazing to find out they recorded it mostly on tour. Extraordinary. It sounds like it was recorded in one room. I think it's accounted for by the fact they just sound like that. They just sound that magnificent. I was not a huge fan of the first album. I remember reading the story about how, I think it was Glyn Johns again, the story about him playing it to George Harrison, and George Harrison didn't really get it. I wonder if he had played him Zeppelin II he'd have got it. I is not my favourite. On II it felt fully realised. They'd pulled away from that influence of blues; it was still there, but they'd merged it into their own thing. Which again I think is something that people don't associate with Simply Red – we've been enormously influenced by African American music, but we've been influenced by it from a different era. The marriage between black and white started with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and George Gershwin and all these people that ran through music, right through to Elvis, to Jagger, to Robert Plant – we've all in our own ways been enormously influenced by African American music. But the real thing to celebrate is that we made something different out of it. We didn't just copy it. The British especially turned it into something else. It became what we now know as rock music. The Beatles and the Stones are the people who can justifiably claim to have invented what we know as rock music. Not rock & roll, not R&B, not blues, but rock. And that is something to celebrate."

"I grew up in the seventies – the era of the video nasty. My friend had Betamax, while we had VHS, but it seemed like Betamax had all the best horror movies. That was the time when I got exposed to quite a lot of electronic music. I was going to chuck in A Clockwork Orange's soundtrack too. It was 'Timesteps' on that that made the big impression. That and Holst's The Planets. I started to enjoy being frightened by music. My partner at the moment really doesn't understand that. She's a real soul and R&B fanatic. She doesn't get the fact that music's got to scare you. The Halloween soundtrack gives me a knot in my stomach… that's become a mark of quality for me in music over the years. Unless it's IBS [chuckles]. It's the tension. Quite a lot of my descriptions of music have little tags like ""nosebleed"". Music can induce a very physical response. I developed this theory that music was analogous to physical activity. Like sneezing; something as simple as that. It mirrors the rhythms of the body. A couple of years back I got Phantasm on DVD and the music on that had a similar effect. It's clear to me now, looking back after years and years of being a music fan, that John Carpenter's stuff in general opened up another field of things I enjoyed in music. The whole krautrock thing. There's a huge element of fear in that. And John Carpenter's work on Escape From New York… that dense, heavy atmosphere. He was consistently brilliant up until about 1988 when the novelty of synthesisers wore off. They became a kind of cheesy thing. But during that era, there wasn't that kitschy element to electronic music – it was genuinely seen as otherworldly and that still comes through to this day. The best of it transcends that kitsch vibe. Like Computer World by Kraftwerk. That sounds more modern and harder than most of the electronic music being made today. It seems weird to me really – to put this ironic slant on something that still works."