"I have a daughter who is six next week. I played her some Bruce Springsteen. She's really into sad songs. I played her 'The River' and she really locked into that song [Black suddenly starts singing, doing an amazing impression of The Boss]. She asked: ‘Is this a sad song? I like the sad songs.’ She really likes Bruce Springsteen. I really liked this record, and I downloaded it for our kitchen listening. I really got into some of the other tracks. 'State Trooper' is so great, so minimalist. It’s fucking two chords and a few words. It’s the most and the best example of that Bruce Springsteen song where he’s the character of a down and out desperate guy. And it isn't going to get any better. I’ve got into listening to Suicide. I didn’t realise that Bruce Springsteen covered a Suicide song. It made sense he’d get into the vibe of the song. It’s a song called 'Dream Baby Dream'. Suicide are so good at the psycho-rock’n’roll-landscape. Even though Bruce is not trying to be ironic, I think that Bruce Springsteen is trying to retain some primal instincts while being a modern guy on the street with a story to tell. Bruce Springsteen gets a lot of bad press because people like his songs so much. I’m OK when someone I really like does something I’m not totally into. I’m not worried. I still have the records I really love. If they’re really going to go to the top of the mountain, they can’t be there all the time."

"One of the first jobs I ever had was working as a caddy on a golf course, and I worked just long enough so I could buy Lodger by David Bowie. The second job I had was cutting lawns, and I remember it was one of those hot summer days, I was sweating and getting attacked by wasps, and I was just thinking 'This is all worthwhile, because when I'm done here I'm going to ride my bike and go and buy the cut out vinyl of Suicide'. Cut outs were like the discount version. To be honest with you, I don't really even remember why I was fixated on buying the first Suicide album. Part of it was the cover, and the guy who ran my local record store, his name was Johnny, he was this alcohol and drug-addicted crazy person, and you'd walk in and he'd be playing all these random records, from Nick Drake to the Grateful Dead to The Clash to Miles Davis, and one day he was playing Suicide. It sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before. I think I was about 14. It wasn't until many years later that I met anyone who liked Suicide. I don't know if you experienced this as well, but when I was growing up albums were these almost, not to sound too grad studenty, totemic things that you would take into your house. Nowadays if I hear a song and it doesn't immediately resonate with me I probably won't spend any time on it. Some of the early records that I bought, like Public Image's Second Edition or Suicide, I'd made the effort to bring these into my house. I only had nine or 10 albums in my possession, so if I didn't understand a record back then I would think it was my fault. I'd think that the people making the record were smarter and more sophisticated than I was, and the fact that I didn't understand it was indicative of my own shortcomings. It was the middle of the summer, and I didn't really have a lot of friends, I didn't have a lot going on. My mum would go to work in the day and I was pretty much left alone to read books and watch TV. I had a lot of free time to listen to records. I took the Suicide album home and it didn't make sense to me, but I spent day after day and week after week listening to it until I cracked the code and it started to make sense. The first song is 'Ghostrider', and I still remember that Saul on the road to Damascus moment when I was listening to it for the third or fourth time, and there's that recurring line ""America America is killing its youth"", and I'd never heard anyone say anything like that before. And to say it in such a throwaway, casual way, it wasn't delivered in a portentous way, it's a throwaway lyric in a song, and that was the moment that really resonated. At the same time I was taking guitar lessons, and my teacher loved very complicated well-produced modern jazz fusion and heavy metal with long guitar solos, and he'd force me to listen to Van Halen or Larry Carlton and then when I listened to Suicide I was first confused - am I allowed to like something that clearly my music teacher hates? And finally I admitted to myself I don't like these well-produced records, I like these strange sounds. I think it also really corrupted my musical DNA."