"This was the first record I took acid to with Richard [Ashcroft]. My dad bought it for 20p in a junk shop. It was the same shop where I used to get all my pedals from. Twenty quid for a flanger and that was what the first Verve record was based on – that flanger. Funkadelic – it didn't even have the proper cover on it, it was just in a tattered white sleeve. I can remember listening to it not under the influence and thinking, ""This is a bit strange!"" Then my folks were away for a week and Richard came and stopped with me for a bit and we did acid. It was my first time, but I think he'd done it a couple of times. We were walking about the field at the back of my house for a bit, but then we went back and inevitably starting ploughing through all the records. Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix, stuff like that. But that Funkadelic record was the one really – we put that up against our first demo and it made our demo sound like toy music. We had a moment of revelation. Not as painful as later on, but just that we were heading in the wrong direction. That's the acid cringe – that portentous, pontificating moment. Because suddenly it was like, ""Oh fucking hell, that really makes sense now"". Those first three Funkadelic albums for me define what a guitar band should sound like. They're just incredible. Eddie Hazel, he sits in the place for me where Ron Asheton does for most people. I love the Stooges but Eddie Hazel crystallised… I don't know if it's as simple as saying psychedelic guitar. He was cramming lots of ideas in. The violence of it to me is what's really appealing. It's the destructive force behind it, but maintaining a beauty about. With Ron Asheton it's all about annihilation, and I like that as well and I do indulge in that. But with Eddie there's texture and space and atmosphere. There's a big fire burning in the middle of it and it is such powerful music. That's what started my love affair with tape echo. I think I had a tape echo at that point, but I wasn't really using it that much. In fact I don't think there's that much on record that caught me using it, which is a shame. But live we were a bit more ferocious than we were presented on record and this is where that came from. I was also into EVOL by Sonic Youth at the time. That's one of my favourite records."

"Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis is one of the best written accounts of a musician’s life. It carefully takes the myth of Elvis and puts it into human terms, giving you a sense of the shock of the new. From childhood in Tupelo, Mississippi through his years in Memphis, Hollywood and Las Vegas, the book puts you in the room with Elvis and his family, friends and collaborators. In the early years you are struck by the genuine innocence and good-naturedness he personified – an accessible small-town boy. Fans would line up outside his mother’s kitchen and he would come out to spend time with them after finishing the family dinner. You can see a kid trying to navigate an unformed world, a world we now know as the modern music business. He was self-aware, though, and brought a new vulnerability and disregard to performing. The first book ends with his mother’s death and his induction into the army, in many ways the beginning of his descent into drugs and isolation. In Hollywood he becomes commodified and put under a kind of artistic house arrest. It is frustrating to read how often his intentions and creative ideas were thwarted. His music had become carefully controlled and the way he had made his great early music was undermined. Later, in the 70s, you get accounts of him gatecrashing the White House and demanding to be made an FBI agent on the spot (Richard Nixon’s henchmen agreed) or starting his Tennessee Karate Institute with outlandish personalised karate uniforms. Though it is impossible for a book to sum up a life, especially one on the scale of Elvis’s, Guralnick’s accounts are ultimately about the impossibility of coming through your wildest dreams unscathed. But it’s more than a cautionary tale: it’s a document of the ways Elvis embodied the childlike and the primal and turned it into a kind of freedom."

"Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis is one of the best written accounts of a musician’s life. It carefully takes the myth of Elvis and puts it into human terms, giving you a sense of the shock of the new. From childhood in Tupelo, Mississippi through his years in Memphis, Hollywood and Las Vegas, the book puts you in the room with Elvis and his family, friends and collaborators. In the early years you are struck by the genuine innocence and good-naturedness he personified – an accessible small-town boy. Fans would line up outside his mother’s kitchen and he would come out to spend time with them after finishing the family dinner. You can see a kid trying to navigate an unformed world, a world we now know as the modern music business. He was self-aware, though, and brought a new vulnerability and disregard to performing. The first book ends with his mother’s death and his induction into the army, in many ways the beginning of his descent into drugs and isolation. In Hollywood he becomes commodified and put under a kind of artistic house arrest. It is frustrating to read how often his intentions and creative ideas were thwarted. His music had become carefully controlled and the way he had made his great early music was undermined. Later, in the 70s, you get accounts of him gatecrashing the White House and demanding to be made an FBI agent on the spot (Richard Nixon’s henchmen agreed) or starting his Tennessee Karate Institute with outlandish personalised karate uniforms. Though it is impossible for a book to sum up a life, especially one on the scale of Elvis’s, Guralnick’s accounts are ultimately about the impossibility of coming through your wildest dreams unscathed. But it’s more than a cautionary tale: it’s a document of the ways Elvis embodied the childlike and the primal and turned it into a kind of freedom."