"This one’s a no-brainer. It was the first time I’d ever heard any band play that way; Deep Purple weren’t the same as Led Zeppelin, they were unique. Though I don’t recall the year it happened, I saw Purple playing with Uriah Heep at Sheffield City Hall… which brings me to my next selection."

"It was their sixth album, I think, the one before We’re An American Band. There used to be a jukebox in one of the Sheffield pubs that I frequented, and it had lots of great tracks by what were then quite obscure American bands. We spent a shitload of money on playing Grand Funk Railroad and Black Oak Arkansas, but especially Grand Funk."

"I kept reading about punk, but the local radio station wouldn’t play punk; they didn’t think it was real music. That led to me one of the musical discoveries of my life. One night, I really wanted to hear what this punk music was and, turning the radio dial, I heard John Peel’s radio show. I started listening to it and taking songs off there all the time, and that became my musical education. It made me want to form a group; the early Pulp were really just a ragbag of the influences that we’d picked up from listening to John Peel’s show every night. The first Devo album came out that year [in 1978], and I went to see them play at the City Hall in Sheffield, which was quite influential. One of the first songs that Pulp learned how to play was the Devo song “Gut Feeling.” A couple of years later, when we first did some recordings, I took them to John Peel—he used to do these road shows at colleges, and I just went along to the one he did in Sheffield and hung around and gave him the tape after when he was putting all his records back into his DJ box at the end. He listened to it on the way home, and that really changed my life. Then he gave us a session [in 1981]. We were all still at school. I was 16 or maybe just 17, and the drummer was 15 and he looked about 12. He could hardly reach the bass drum pedal to play the drum."

"Rock Lobster' was the first song I heard from it, I think from John Peel. I didn't listen to the record for a long time because the club I went to in Sheffield, an alternative indie club called The Limit, always played either 'Rock Lobster' or 'Planet Claire' every single night for three years that I went there. You would hear that, 'Bela Lugosi's Dead' by Bauhaus, 'Shack Up' by A Certain Ratio, 'She Sells Sanctuary' by The Cult, 'This Is The Day' by The The... nowadays the guy could have been a Spotify playlist, he hardly ever deviated and God knows why he turned up and put them on by hand, but he did. That was the only place to go if you were considered a bit of a weirdo."

"Most of the albums I’ve chosen are from the 1970s – they are ones that moulded my style. So, Wishbone Ash invented twin harmony guitars in heavy rock [they were also a huge influence on Iron Maiden]. I used to go and see them when they played in Leeds or Sheffield or Barnsley – they were on circuit a lot in the early 70s. I was a bass player then, and they had a great bass player [Martin Turner] with a good style, with really cool vocal harmonies. Argus felt groundbreaking – it was a big explosion of rock and Wishbone Ash were a pretty loud band. It was a good grounding for me to learn their songs - this particular album is a concept album so you learned the whole thing. That’s how songs get into your psyche. In Saxon we used the twin guitar harmonies occasionally – we don’t want to copy anybody, but it is a theme, it is in there."

"I got into them through this album. The rest of the guys had never heard of them. We went to Sheffield University to see them – I took the band; I said they had to see this great groove – and there were about 100 people in there. It was a very eventful night with punks and rock fans together, because I think UK Subs were supporting. I loved the style they had – the repetitive riffs and rolling bass, which was more bluesy than metal. They were very aggressive – Bon Scott had massive presence on stage and he could sing and wrote great lyrics. And the rest of the band loved them as well, and it really affected us – without AC/DC, we wouldn’t have written ‘Wheels Of Steel’. We toured America with them in 1980, when they were doing Back in Black, on Brian Johnson’s first tour. They were really friendly guys - they had a bar backstage so you could get a pint while they were playing"