"Unfortunately I never saw them, but Kilburn & The High Roads [Ian Dury’s first band] used to play near where we were hanging around as kids. I was a couple of years younger than the rest of the band, who went to see them at the Tally-Ho. They were a huge phenomenon round our way. And they made a great album called Handsome, but a lot of the stuff Ian Dury was working towards on that album really came to fruition on New Boots And Panties. It was slightly infused by the whole punk thing, it had that wild energy, but it still had that vaudevillian faded grandeur of the music hall. Again, it’s about comedy and terror: “arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks” is a pretty fun thing to hear when you’re a teenager, coming out of the speakers! He was pretty acerbic in person. I remember I was with Clive Langer once, our producer, and he said “Ian, I love your work” and Ian said “So fucking what?” That was about the strength of it, with Ian. We got to know him better near the end. He played one of our Madstock gigs, and we recorded a track with him just before he died, called ‘Drip-Fed Fred’, which is rather good. I think he always saw us as slightly usurping him, which is kind of true. He could be very acidic. When he was working in our studio, I remember the police were called a couple of times. But an amazing artist and fantastic lyricist, and of course you listen to some of those songs now, ‘Clever Trevor’, ‘Billericay Dickie’, ‘Plaistow Patricia’ and all that, and they haven’t dated at all."

"This was the same year as the Roxy record. Mott has split up by that point. They splintered: Mott the Hoople became simply Mott and Mick Ronson and Ian Hunter went off doing their own thing. You could follow them both. I saw Mott at the Top Rank and I saw Ian Hunter and Mick Ronson at Sheffield City Hall. This still sounds fresh today: it was raw, done in a month. His guitar playing here is as good as it was on any record. There was a solo on a song called 'The Truth The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth' - it's one of those things you'd play to a kid whose learning how to play the guitar. The way he winds it up; the sheer pain in the song. Apparently at the time he'd read a scathing review and was fucking furious. He went in and did the whole thing in one take. And I'm thinking 'in a parallel universe, this would have been the next Mott the Hopple record' you know? But my god did the other guys blow it; my god did they blow it. This would have been such a great Mott record. To this day, Phil Collen [Def Leppard guitarist] will say his vibrato is Ronson's vibrato. A lot of people can't do vibrato properly - Phil was definitely influenced by it, also by that beautiful open whammy tone. I'm not sure how it leaks into Leppard as a whole. I think the most logical theft we ever did was the 'Whooaah' section on 'Photograph'. The guys in the band are all great singers; they're arguably better than me. Put the four of us together and it's like Queen round the mike. Well: almost..."

"Records is a big one for me. When I first moved to New York in 2000, I tried to see him play any time he was playing. Some of my favorite shows I've ever seen were a couple of Marclays performances, solo or with DJ Trio. This record embodies the spirit of those live performances He's another absolute hero of mine – if you haven't seen him perform you should. He played on a Late Night show as this kind of novelty. And this was in 1980. As DJing is, it's just re-contextualising sound, music. But he does it with such a keen ear and there's a point to why he mixes certain things. He destroys the records by putting tape over them. As interesting and as funny as that is but musically, the results he gets from this are really, really exciting. His shows were some of the most exciting shows. I saw him play at a club in New York called Tonic, that closed down years ago, where a lot of new music was played. I saw him play in 2002, when it was him in what was known as DJ Trio which is 3 DJs, playing in the collage-y nature of what he was doing. And it was so mind-blowing. So I was obsessed with him. He was a guy that I had no shame fanboying out with. I'd see him out on the street and I'd go "Hi Christian!" He's a major artist – he did this piece called The Clock, which is toured all over the world. What's that big gallery in London right now? White Cube. He now has installations all over the world for his video art."