"Around 1983 or '84, pop music stopped doing it for me. It was getting a bit clean. There was still a lot of good stuff, but I think it was The Smiths... I wasn't obsessed with them the way Sice was and a few other people I knew, but listening to them made you want to find something else. Then, when The Jesus And Mary Chain came out that was it. My brother brought their second single home and I wasn't sure at first. It was such a racket. It still is. But it was 'You Trip Me Up' that really did it for me - I was sold. This beautiful marriage of... it's not nice feedback, controlled feedback like you'd get off The Who. It's awful. But the core of what's going on - the song - is so lovely. And they looked fantastic, like The Beatles in Hamburg. They looked like a gang. It just seemed like they were blowing everything away and starting again. I went to listen to the Velvets after I'd heard this, and the Velvets did it... it was either noise or it was a great melody. They never really did the two together, whereas the Mary Chain managed to marry the two. The video is just fantastic. They're walking around somewhere in the Mediterranean, sitting on the beach in full leather gear with their massive guitars. After hearing the Mary Chain, that was all I wanted to listen to - bands who did that. They were a big band. They were in Smash Hits, which is hard to believe."

"I would say that David Bowie had the biggest single influence on all music that came out of the time period when I started at the beginning of the 1980s. And all other bands in that modern music zone were influenced most by David Bowie. Throughout the seventies we could safely say that he pretty much owned it. If The Beatles owned the sixties, Bowie owned the seventies. I could have picked any one of his albums. I thought about Hunky Dory which I have played most, or Ziggy Stardust... which was the first album I ever bought. I thought about Station To Station which changed things as his influences morphed and then the whole Berlin trilogy which were extraordinary records. I decided on Aladdin Sane as I think it is the ultimate glam album. Musically, it was fuelled with seventies energy. Mick Ronson’s guitar work is spectacular, the tracks all have an anxiety to them – songs like ‘Cracked Actor’ and ‘Panic In Detroit’ really had an edginess. The singles ‘The Jean Genie’ and ‘Drive-In Saturday’ were probably not even the best tracks on the album – ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ is my favourite track on the album – but had an attitude. You could taste the air they were recorded in. It was the album that turned Bowie into an absolute superstar worldwide. I played it a lot when I was a kid and it was one of those records that made me want to be in a band. Also, it’s by far the greatest cover of the 1970s. The image of the flash across Bowie’s face really resonates. It’s held up – I see that the V&A museum are having a big show of Bowie’s career and memorabilia (and so they should) and the image they are using to advertise it is the front cover of Aladdin Sane."

"I heard a tremendous amount of first-class soul music... my father was in the Royal Air Force and I lived on a base. It just so happened that it coincided with the period of pirate radio stations, so a transistor radio was a virtually unmediated way of hearing absolutely incredibly music. I heard Hendrix, Electric Prunes, all the best soul music. You didn't know what these people looked like, who they were, anything. There was this guy Nicky who I used to play football with, his father was from Jamaica, and when he was moving on he gave the youth club his soul collection. The guy who ran the youth club, he was championing what I thought was starting to be second-rate output from The Beatles, because after 'Strawberry Fields' or 'Magical Mystery Tour' they came out with this Sgt Pepper's thing which I had issues with. Meanwhile, we had every good soul record. You also had Johnnie Walker, I think, on [Radio] Caroline. This also represents that period in the 70s when I was listening to Al Green, Sly, Stevie Wonder; the most interesting and radical music that was going. It's pathetic to go 'black soul music, oh right, Al Green's Greatest Hits', because the productions, the voice and everything is incredible. Let's just say one of the greatest singers, that's for sure, and he has to represent all of that."