"Of all the people who were a direct influence on Oasis, the line goes back to the Sex Pistols, whether that’s Joy Division/New Order, The Smiths, The Stone Roses or Factory Records, and if they hadn’t played those two gigs in Manchester who knows what would have happened? And on that album you’ve got Lydon or Johnny Rotten with that voice going on about the Royal Family and boredom and the rest while you’ve got Steve Jones just hammering it out like a pub rocker or like someone who’s into Slade or The Small Faces rather than punk rock, and between those two things you’ve got it. Every time I listen to it I think that if it came out tomorrow it would fit right in, it wouldn’t feel dated. Way back at the start of Oasis we did a radio session for Mark Radcliffe and during ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ Liam out of nowhere sang ‘Sunshi-i-ine’, you know, with about ten extra syllables and when it went out on the radio I remember thinking, ‘Fuck me, that sounds great.’ And when we came to record I was like, ‘Sing it like you did on Radcliffe again, like Lydon.’ It was his idea, I just pushed him toward it."

"Oasis definitely did change my life when I first heard them! [Bell later played bass and rhythm guitar in Oasis, 1999-2009.] They were like a breath of fresh air. To put it into context, Ride were working on the third album, Carnival Of Light, and we were taking a bit of a break. We were starting to get a bit frayed at the edges and we were starting to pull in different directions musically, too. “We were really shooting for a kind of West Coast Byrdsy California sound mixed with a little bit of Led Zeppelin and a little bit of classic rock. I think we were also subconsciously trying to make a cleaner record, because we’d stopped getting played on the radio… but then along comes Oasis sounding like the Jesus And Mary Chain meets the Sex Pistols and just completely blew everything out of the water! “As we’re talking about guitars, I should just say that I think Noel’s really underrated as a lead guitar player. His playing is like a John Squire-y thing, but there’s a lot more muscle behind it. He kind of trademarked his own style, which has become something that everyone uses now – that massively overdriven sound with quite a lot of delay on it. [His playing] just sounded epic."

"This was the first Ramones song I heard. I was nineteen or twenty years old and I’d read about them in New Yorker Magazine and alternative music magazines like Village Voice and Trouser Press. They were getting all this press but they weren’t getting any radio play in Wisconsin, so you had to wait until it came into the record store to hear it and I was smitten the first time I heard ‘Blitzkrieg Bop.’ I bought their record and it just floored me in its simplicity, two minutes or a minute and thirty renditions of songs that were verse, chorus, verse, chorus, chorus, end of song. The songs were super precise and cut down to the bare bone, they were pop songs and had a very crude simplicity to the recordings. I think I went through three vinyl copies of their first record. I’d get up in the morning and play it twice before I’d go to the university and then I’d come back at night and just blast it non-stop. We’d have these punk rock party nights just listening to The Ramones album and ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ always set the tone for me, it’s an incredible song. We’d bring all our friends over, get kegs of beer, clear all the furniture out of our living room and jump up and down and slam-dance. The first Ramones record is the greatest punk rock record of all time, it inspired The Sex Pistols, it inspired everybody. A thousand punk rock bands were formed after they saw The Ramones, they were the first true originals to do that and I’m still a huge Ramones fan."

"If you're listening to prog like Gong then you're going to bump into Magma. They make their own language on their records, so we made our own words for Magma albums. A number of Magma albums would pop up in various friends' record collection, and each one was quite different. On Üdü Wüdü there's an 18-minute track called 'De Futura', which is like a suite and it moves to different tempos and it's got all these cross rhythms in it; it's an overwhelmingly transcendent record. There was a rock disco that we used to go to in Manchester in the 70s and you could take your own records and we used to take this record. You'd see these rock fans freaking out to it. It was a curious time in Manchester because you had the punk thing, but all these other oddball things like Magma and Earth, Wind And Fire were standing beside each other. It wasn't as tribal as it's been made it out to be. You'd go up to a free festival in Rochdale that was called the Deeply Vale festival and all these subcultures would be represented there, because all of the sub-cultures would be big enough to stand on their own two feet. But at this disco in Manchester, you'd hear Bowie and Roxy Music, and Magma, probably some Genesis and some Sex Pistols."