"From one extreme to the other. Belle and Sebastian were one side of what was happening in Glasgow, and Scotland, in the ‘90s when I was really young and just starting out and to me Country Teasers represent another parallel, a much darker and more sinister side of what was going on. “They came out of Edinburgh, where they were all from, apart from Ben Wallers, the singer, who’s English. They’re another band I put on in The 13th Note and another band I was drawn to both sonically and lyrically. As you’ll know if you’ve heard this record, Destroy All Human Life, some of the lyrics are extremely difficult. Ben’s attitude has always been to try to make people as uncomfortable as they possibly can be and to explore issues that are usually not talked about at all. “This song, weirdly, I find to be quite beautiful; the melodic line is really wistful and melancholic, which as I said, is what I was aiming for with this collection of songs. There’s a sort of perverse humour to this particular track too. That’s what makes it all the more vivid for me; he’s talking about his bandmates, who I can picture because I knew all those characters at the time. “He rips into them mercilessly! He’s saying Richie’s so weak he almost can’t be seen and something about Eck being skinny and Alan, the guitarist, having a big hook nose. Simon, I think, he said had funny feet and then at the end, he says, “I am the perfect image of mankind / Made by god to remind him of his son / My back is straight like a straight white line / Golden apples issue from the hole in my bum.” It’s really fucking funny! “And also, it captures a particular sense of humour that was shared by a lot of people I hung out with in Scotland at that time and still do. It’s quite dark and sadistic.”"

"The Bob Dylan song “Mr. Tambourine Man,” was like a psychedelic version of a Woody Guthrie song. But then the Byrds turned it into something unlike anything my young ears had heard before. It sounded like jangly pots and pans, bells. If you’re someone who grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore, the song is like a little telegraph from someplace else. Hearing that, I realized: I have to get out of here, because there are people in other places. There’s a whole world out there that I don’t know anything about. I had an idea that I would play great literate rock songs in coffee houses around Baltimore. I did that for a little while, which was kind of ambitious for a high school kid. I’d do songs by the Kinks or the Who, or songs with really insightful lyrics that the folkies had never heard before. My parents went to my shows once in awhile, but not a lot. A few years later, when I was still in the art school orbit, I visited New York City. A friend and I had a group where I played ukulele and violin, and he played accordion, often in the street. We played standards and were kind of eccentric-looking. I would dress in old suits and had a long beard, and kids would come up to me and say, “Mister, are you one of those men who don’t drive cars?” I was not. We’d heard about the Warhol scene at Max’s Kansas City, and so my friend and I went in there—with the full beard and everything—curious to see where the cool people were. We were so out of place, and I remember David Bowie came in dressed in his full glam outfit, with the orange hair, the space suit, everything. And I just thought, We don’t fit in here. We better go."

"I haven't listened to this record for ages. But I intend to! I walk a lot and used to live by Richmond Park and I like to walk with an album as I don't do that very often. That was one of my Richmond Park albums. There's that Kate Bush element, beautiful, mad lyrical content and some of those song titles are like 'what the fuck?' Just great. What was I doing during this period? I was retired. I quit in the mid 1990s and decided I was going to teach myself to make records for other people like a producer. And it was a time when Auto-tune was king in pop music and this – and other things – made me realise I didn't want to do it and also I probably can't do it. It's quite an art to make songs for other people. You give it your everything but no one writes songs for bands, no one wrote songs for The Smiths. They write them for solo artists most of the time. That void is taken up by pop and you have to make records which are autotuned because a lot of the time - in the 1990s – the idea was 'Can she sing? Well, it doesn't matter'. But it did to me! It is an alchemy of Christ knows what to make a good record and I don't think I've got the chops to do that [for someone else]. I had a record deal with Polydor in Germany at one point specifically within the context of not having to release the album anywhere else! I did a bit of promotion there but nothing happened. It wasn't the kind of record that used to get me on the radio in the 1980s but it also wasn't the kind of record that was enough of truly doing what I wanted to do."

"I had this back in the days when The Monkees were a TV show and they were everybody's favourite. Every Saturday you'd rush home to watch them. Bear in mind that television then was three channels, and so pop music in any sense was really limited. There was Ready Steady Go on a Friday, Top Of The Pops had started, but you didn't get a lot. You didn't get a lot of kids with guitars, especially with long hair and flared trousers that were glamorously American. But the real thing came when the tunes that they had were so good. Every week you watched the show and every week there'd be a great song at the end. You had to have one of their records, and this was the album that I had. There are so many varying styles of songs on this record. You'd go from syrupy ballads to something a lot tougher, but most of the character in the work was really about the melodies and the tunes, many of which were written by Neil Diamond and people like that. It was weird that there was that whole stable of people sat in an office from 9-5, writing tunes. But they understood how it worked and how to do it, whereas with The Damned, for example, we didn't really get arrangements or dynamics when we tried to write until later on. But when you heard that variation in, if you like, quality music- and it was quality music, The Monkees, even though saying that would've got you hung back in the 70s- it made it okay to be diverse. So when The Damned moved on and we started getting to Machine Gun Etiquette and Strawberries and those kinds of records it was fair game to do something that wasn't a raucous three chord punk song, because we'd grown up with all of these bands that I'm talking about, and actually they all seemed to show an element of that. So it rubbed off."

"It's a unique combination of what Zack de la Rocha is doing with his voice and what Tom Morello [guitarist] is doing. If you separate the two, you find yourself thinking: "Well, how could this possibly work?" But again they were game changers. They came along at a time in Los Angeles when there was nobody else doing that style. I don't think anyone has done anything like that successfully. They were a band that were immersed in different kinds of activism and that was something that definitely caught my attention. Who else was doing that? Who was doing that and selling millions of records? And, of course, by doing that they were able to cross over into different scenes and different generations of people that could listen to that type of music. Some of the stuff on here is still just as relevant today as it was when it was released. It's just the intensity of some of those messages for me as a singer. He performs with such conviction. You have got to believe what Zack is saying and he makes you understand what he's talking about. That's the heart of what Rage is all about. They're all behind exactly what he's saying. There's been a lot made in recent years of the idea that bands don't have anything to say anymore, or that they're ambivalent now, but I think everyone is saying something. Even Priest have made a comment in 'Crossfire', where we talk about religion and gun violence. I think a lot of the time these messages just slip under the radar for some people. Priest have never pushed back from making a comment on things that we see in the world or that affect us and think need to be commented on. So I think it's definitely out there. It's just that bands are now doing it a lot more subtly than Rage did."

"I listened to that record non-stop, it was a record that was in my house when I was really small and I knew the whole thing back and forward by the time I was six years old, as that's one of the many times we moved. I remember listening to the song 'So Far Away' in our station wagon as it pulled away from my neighbourhood and waving goodbye to my best friend. Throughout my life I've had a different favourite song on that record for a different reason and it sort of stayed with me. When I was a karaoke host, one of the first songs I did was 'I Feel The Earth Move'. I think her story is so interesting, too, of starting out as a songwriter and not feeling confident and then deciding to put out her own songs with her own voice. That was a really empowering story when I finally learnt it. I just thought she was this cool, powerful '70s woman with her curly hair and swirly skirts. I found her fascinating as a person as well, like a role model. She played piano, sang and wrote the songs, and everyone knew that, it was really implicit at the time, that it was her album. A lot of singers, male and female, were singing songs written by other people and Carole King had been writing songs for those people, then this album was like, "I'm writing it for myself." I didn't know she wrote 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow?' until I heard her sing it and her version was so different than the popular version that I'd heard and I was like, "Wow!" It was a great album in the vein of Thriller – every song on that record could be a hit. And it was like she made it; I knew a woman made it from start to finish and I knew I could write songs. It was something that everybody had that was very popular that actually still holds water and it's really good."