"I guess I probably knew Dylan before I knew about The Band and kind of found The Band through Dylan. But I like the way that all of them sing. The three of them in particular, they've got really great, really characterful voices. And they do that thing of switching voices so you get the first verse with Rick Danko and then the bridge will be Robbie Robertson and that changes the perspective and stuff. And that's something that when Gang Of Four started, by the time we got to Entertainment!, one of the things we wanted was different characters. I kind of saw songs sometimes as being a little play, a little drama, so you have different characters. You have the main protagonist and maybe the other voice would be making comments about that character or somebody else would be a different character. To a certain extent, some of that came from The Band, I think. They're a weird bunch, they came from Canada, ended up in America and they kind of drew parallels between themselves and North American history and the way a lot of Canadians ended up in New Orleans and they called them Acadian driftwood. And they kind of sing about aspects of the Civil War and stuff like that. And also they've got a sense of history. It's very much not standard rock & roll subject matter, you know. It's not cars, girls, guitars, and I love that. And they're emotionally touching. They didn't have easy lives, things didn't pan out brilliantly. I'm touched by the way that you can hear their struggles through life in their music and what they're saying."

"If somebody asked me at the time of this release 'What's it's like on the streets of New York?' I would just put on this Mobb Deep album and tell them to listen to it in its entirety. This album is Queens and it's representative of a whole part of New York City. There's a lot of anger in here – parts of it make you want to punch somebody in the face – but there's also a lot of classic club bangers in there too that just rock. It's a record of opposites and they were really a band all about opposites and differences. They were probably one of the last really different bands of that era who were just great. They always played such banging music."

"If you wanna talk about soul music, I was a big Motown fan and I came a bit later to Otis Redding, but he just had that bit more edge. Obviously it wasn’t rock, but he could do a Motown song, like ‘My Girl’, but with everything roughed-up. I remember reading that when they recorded it, he’d do three or four takes of each track, and they’d all be different, and you could have used any one of them. And you can hear that: it’s like jazz, almost, these wild interpretations. He was in his prime, and that band was in its prime, Steve Cropper was really flying, and there’s nothing much more to say about it, just an extremely powerful album."

"This is the album with 'Brown Shoes Don't Make It'. What colour shoes are you wearing? Black? Phew. It was the absurdity that I liked in Frank Zappa - this album also had 'Call Any Vegetable'. It was stuff that just didn't make any sense, but they played so well they must know what they're talking about. That was why I liked Soft Machine as well: "Hope for happiness! Happiness! Happiness!" What? I never knew what it was. And that was like The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Arthur Brown, too. Unpredictability is what I like most in rock bands. But only when it's done well. Like with The Who - they had great pop songs, and then they had 'Boris The Spider'."