"This had a profound effect on me when I was really young. I was maybe eleven or twelve years old when I saw The Who play ‘My Generation’ on a TV show called The Smothers Brothers Show. I was sitting with my brother, sister and parents and I just freaked out at how powerful they were. Watching Keith Moon, I just couldn’t understand what he was doing. I’d never seen anyone play like that before, he blew up his bass drum at the end of the performance, it was unbelievable and that’s when I told my parents I wanted to get a drum set. My mum said “Well, if you want to get a drum set you’ll have to take lessons and keep up your piano lessons too.” I promised I’d do both and kept up my piano lessons for about a year, but then I dropped them and focussed on the drums and started trying to figure out how to play Rock and Roll. The Who are in my top five bands of all time, in my home studio in Los Angeles I’ve got photos of them spread throughout the studios and the hallways. They had everything, they looked cool, Pete Townsend was an incredible writer, the way he played the guitar with windmills and swooping arm movements, Roger Daltrey was a great singer and an iconic frontman and John Entwistle’s bass runs held the band together. They had an incredibly unique sound. I still love this song, it’s in my top ten greatest rock songs ever written. It speaks to the essence of the confusion of adolescence and even the confusion of being an adult and what kind of world we live in. It never gets old, it’s a constant recurring theme that every generation of kids grows up with."

"I’m a huge Oasis fan. I saw Supersonic a couple of months ago and I loved it. I like seeing Liam and Noel interact when they talk to each other because they’re clearly brothers, they go at each other and they’re funny, some of what they say is really articulate, some of it is completely at loggerheads. I remember I was in Los Angeles, heading to the studio listening to the K-Rock radio station and they said “Here’s the new song by a British band called Oasis” and ‘Live Forever’ came on and I just loved it, I turned it up really loud in the car. It’s the guitar riff and the sentiment behind the lyrics, but the second I heard Liam singing he was just going for it. He’s got one of the greatest rock voices there is, there’s a kind of sneer almost in the way he sings, it’s all attitude. Live Forever’ was my first impression of Oasis and it’s the template for what makes Oasis sound like Oasis. I love the tone and Noel’s guitar and I like the chord progression, but to me what makes Oasis Oasis is Liam’s singing. The songs that Noel sang are lovely, but he doesn’t have that same bravado that Liam has. It was a combination of the two of them, but it definitely needed Liam’s vocals out front and centre for the kind of attitude and swagger that he would bring to the song. Again, when I heard it I was ‘damn, I wish I’d written that song.’ It’s got a killer guitar riff and the chord progression is good. It’s dead simple and like most Oasis songs they’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, in fact usually Noel would admit he was just trying to write a good Beatles rip-off song!"

"Roy was about the same time. The Old Grey Whistle Test was on later than Top Of The Pops, and you had to be a bit older to stay up late and get away with it. I got my first sighting of Jobriath on there. I don't know if I saw a flash of Klaus Nomi on there too, and of course David doing 'Queen Bitch', Roxy doing 'Ladytron', and the New York Dolls was quite a moment for some people. It was via Genesis doing 'I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)' from Selling England By The Pound, that I became interested slightly in that longer haired world. I didn't go for Pink Floyd; I thought there was something not quite right about hippies, and you were either a hippie or not a hippie. Somehow, I heard the track 'Hallucinating Light' by Roy Harper, and was amazed by the quality of his voice. And of course, he had Chris Spedding playing guitar - David Gilmour plays guitar on the album also - but Chris had a sort of slightly Roxy Music edge to him as well. It is just a great album. 'The Game (Parts 1-5)' is a brilliant song sequence and it just appealed to me, as a perfect artistic statement. None of my other friends got into it, it was almost a guilty pleasure, but there was nothing to be guilty about because it was just a great record. The track where he has the colliery band - 'When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease' - is beautiful. It's hard not to shed a tear - it's a lovely song. He also had connections with Led Zeppelin, who I wasn't interested in at all, but a lot of people only know him because he sung on one of their tracks, but for me he was something outside of that."