"I love Tom Lehrer, I love a lot of writers of funny songs. I like Noël Coward, I like Flanders and Swann and Tom Lehrer is probably the best and funniest. Incredibly intelligent man and he's well aware of the idiocy of what he's doing. Each song lasts for about 1 minute 45 seconds, because it's like, "Here's the joke, go!", it's really good. I think I was about 26 or 27 when I first heard him. I think it might have been 'The Elements', when he set the list of elements to the Gilbert and Sullivan tune, 'I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major-General' is the original from The Pirates Of Penzance - I like Gilbert and Sullivan as well! I think I also liked the idea of one man and a piano, being a bit of an entertainer. I finally got up the nerve to do that myself, five or six years ago, and it's been jolly good fun. I was nervous about it, but knew it was a good time to do it. I had a few songs off that album (Bang Goes The Knighthood) that were suited to it. I did have to do an awful lot of practice to get up to standard on the piano, because I did grade one piano, and then gave up - I'm really completely untutored. So I have a bizarre technique, but it gets me through."

"After Patti, I sold all my record collection because I felt I couldn't have any music around me that didn't do something to me like Horses did. For about six months, I had no other records, except Lou Reed's Berlin as I felt that was comparably powerful and emotive. After those six months, punk started. I thought punk was fun and it reached the anger in me that needed to come out. I had been sent away to school; being sent to a boarding school was like being sent away to prison by parents who apparently loved you. So, I had a lot of anger and distress at this strange turn of events and I started going to punk gigs. The first gig I organised to see was the White Riot tour with The Jam, Buzzcocks, Subway Sect and The Slits. It turned into a bit of a riot and we were these schoolboys in our uniforms with one teacher to chaperone us, and suddenly chairs and tables were flying through the air. After that, I was banned from organising any more trips to punk gigs. So, even though I was banned, I decided to get the school magazine to employ me as a journalist. I would try to interview the first local punk band that came down to Shrewsbury. That happened to be Wire, who were a fascinating band. I think Pink Flag is one of the only punk albums that has stood the test of time. It is a remarkable piece of music. There are songs that last 45 seconds and others that last two or three minutes. It is quite a feat to pull off a 45-second song and make it work. Wire were wonderful to interview – intelligent and articulate – and their music was brutal and yet humorous at the same time, which was a very odd thing for punk. To call an album Pink Flag, after the label that the Nazis put on gay people in the camps, was an incredibly brave thing to do in such homophobic times. Punk, although liberating in many aspects, was pretty homophobic until Tom Robinson came along and confronted it directly. Pink Flag was a miracle of creativity in these short, harsh little songs. Even to this day, when I listen to it, I think it is a masterpiece. I think it would have influenced a band like Pixies. I don't know if Pixies ever heard Wire, but I would be very surprised if they hadn't."

"I think that when this came out I put it in my car and didn’t take it off for six months. Honestly I think this record, at least for me, was one of the influences on us making that first Garbage record. I loved how they reinvented themselves; how they started flirting with electronics and fuzz and beeps and industrial noise yet made these amazing songs. They stirred it all up, threw it against the wall and spat it all out. They redefined themselves and it resulted in what I think is their finest work. At the time I think a lot of people couldn't quite get their head around it and then they went out and did that massive Zoo TV tour, which was quite a sensory experience. You could see that the band were almost making fun of themselves: there's almost a self-deprecation in there, telling us how they were approaching themselves. There's some gritty humour in the songs, I think. We (Garbage) were thrilled to be asked last year to a do a cover of 'Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses' as all of us absolute love that record. When we tried sounding like U2 it didn't work. We needed it to sound like Garbage so, much like U2, we had to sort of reinvent ourselves and take a different slant on it to give it something that we felt comfortable with, which ended up being a whole heap of fun to do! We stripped the verses down and we're all pretty pleased as to how it turned out as we were honoured to have been asked to have been involved. Bono sent us a note and it was lovely; I can't remember exactly what he said but it was something about the way Shirley sang the verses and the bridge making him feel like a peeping Tom. He obviously listened to the track and he got where we were going with it. It was an awesome note."