"I'm just realising as we're going through them - so many of these songs are about loss aren't they? ‘To the East’ isn’t just straight-up melancholy, it’s a song of hope as well; it might be completely redundant, impotent hope, but there is still hope in there. “She's singing to somebody to come back and that the East could be home, but the whole time you're listening to it you suspect the truth of the situation is that those words will never actually be said. Or maybe that's just the way I'm feeling it, I don't know. Again though, it's a very easy song to empathise with; I really believe the voice that's singing it to me. I don't know whether it's about a personal experience or if they're just imagined characters and to be honest, I don't care. I'm right there with them - I'm feeling it too. “I think either our first or second ever show outside of Britain - I can't remember which - was with Electrelane, in Barcelona at that club, Razzmatazz. It was quite the thrill, to be leaving the country to open up for this band we loved. I was really sad when they split up - again, another loss. I wish they were still performing. I think the last time I saw them was at Field Day in 2011 and they were still so great. They did a cover of 'I'm on Fire' by Bruce Springsteen and it was really something else. “They're one of those bands where you only need to hear a few seconds of any given song to know it's them, which means they've also got that trick of being able to make a cover sound like they wrote it themselves.”"

"Following on nicely from “Just What I Needed”, I went to see my Dad in Florida and he had the 12” of “Stand and Deliver” which had “Beat My Guest” on the B-side. “I was into rap at that time, Run DMC and that kind of stuff, so for a ten-year-old it was ‘What the fuck is this?’ I was blown away. I was floored by the riff and “Beat My Guest” has the ultimate guitar riff, it’s so badass. I was into the make-up as well because I was into KISS too, so I thought that was cool. I was mesmerised by the whole look. “My Dad was always one step ahead of me. I remember being with him in Michigan once, we had this cottage we’d go to with my grandparents and he joined us one year, which was really fun. He was looking in the paper to see who was playing in Detroit - which was two hours away - he found out The Dead Kennedys were playing in some tiny little club and he left to go and see them. “I remember thinking my Dad was the coolest, I was ‘What the hell does that mean? He’s into some weird shit.’ He taught me everything. He spoke to me about music, but he doesn’t play music. I acquired a lot of his records when my parents split up, he gave me that Adam Ant record and I was bawling on the plane. “The next time I went to visit my Dad I’d discovered more Adam and The Ants and I wanted to talk to him about all of these other songs I’d heard, but he was already onto the next thing, which was Devo."

"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..."