"This is the record that made me a guitar player. I got given a guitar aged nine and had been taught a couple of things on it, but it’d basically stayed propped against the corner of the room and not used that much… until I first heard The Smiths when I was 13. It was just like, ‘This is what I want to do – I’m doing this! I’m going to be a guitarist in a band!’ “Johnny Marr was like a surrogate guitar teacher right through my early teens - 13, 14, 15 years old - to when I met Mark Gardener at school. We became mates because he heard I could play the riff off Bigmouth Strikes Again and asked me to show him. "That’s how we became friends, so Ride’s got a lot to thank The Smiths for. I still find some of Johnny Marr’s playing totally baffling, like those swoopy lead parts on How Soon Is Now?.”"

" I love that album. I can listen to it as an album in its own right, and I don’t really have to necessarily think of it as a compilation album. I had all the Smiths albums when I was younger. I still have them, you know. … That was a great one. It just always put me in a good mood."