"I hate saying this, but it did what it said on the sleeve! It was them two and it was a lot of drums. It was one of the first records I would listen to because a lot of jazz drumming is very difficult and complicated, if you listen to somebody like Buddy Rich you can't help but think how does he do that; what is he doing? How do you do that? It's very complex which always scared me off. Kenny Clare and Ronnie Stephenson had that same technical proficiency but they didn't use it the same way. They were much more in the mould of Gene Krupa. The parts that they'd play were very musical. I don't know if they were musical to people who weren't drummers, but to me it all made sense. Some of the stuff they did was almost melodic, like patterns on the toms and breaks, and then just trading off each other, which I thought was pretty cool because it was like hearing two people being inspired. Again that was something that really came in with The Damned, with Brian and me. It was almost like a competition sometimes: he would play something and then I would go okay, if you're going to do that then I'm going to do this. And I think that probably came to us from listening to these drum battles and taking on the mentality of that; feeding on what's going on around you, regardless of what it is."

"I love weird people. The thing about voices is there's this idea, and this is my favourite thing about punk, is that I get really sad when people say they can't sing. That's not true. Anyone can be a singer. But when you hear Nina, she sounds like the exorcist. She uses all of her different voices. I don't even know another Nina Hagen record because that's the only one that ever really resonated with me. Playing that at Little Girls Rock camp [a foundation that funds and supports music education for young girls, of which Ditto is on the advisory board along with Tegan And Sarah and Kathleen Hanna], it blew their fucking minds. It blew their minds, and that is why I love Nina Hagen, and Yoko Ono, Diamanda Galas and Nina Simone because all of their voices are instruments. And her look! I met her and what did she say to me, "I didn't escape East Germany for nothing". Her story is phenomenal. It makes sense, because when you come from that kind of place you have to push the envelope because there's nothing to guide you. You have to make it up yourself and when you get to do that without pop culture references you get fucking Nina Hagen. It's so rare. I wonder what the next level of really untouched creativity will be? I wonder what that will look like? "