"I'd only heard the singles on the radio in America, and my mother happened to be going to Germany. I said to her: "Get me any copies you can of Jimi Hendrix." Because I loved the shiny covers that you guys got in Europe, unlike the crappy covers we got. This was 1967. The first time I heard him was 'Hey Joe', on the radio. The playing was so fluid. I kept wondering how many people there were in the band. I got to meet them on their very first tour. [He pulls out his phone, and shows a photo of Hendrix, taken on Febuary 28 1968, at a club in Madison, Wisconsin, followed by a photo of the poster for the gig, at which he was supported by Soft Machine]. It was $3.50 to get in, and I got to see two shows - a six o'clock and a 9.30 show. The photo is backstage at that show. I was thinking: "Man, a guy who looks that cool …" It was the best ever show. I've been around so long that I ended up knowing the guy who was his bodyguard - he worked for us for a while. He wasn't a sweet guy, he was a "sleep with the fishes" kind of guy. He said he used to go out with Jimi and they would goof off, and there was nothing mysterious about him. Hendrix had it all: the voice, the songwriting, the guitar playing, and the weirdness. He was from outer space."

"‘Wichita Lineman’ was my Mum’s favourite song, she played it all the time. Anytime I hear it now it takes me back to being a kid and reminds me of growing up in Viroqua, Wisconsin. I grew up in a small town and with the sound and production of this song I can visualise the bleak Midwestern cornfields and driving through them. Jimmy Webb wrote it and it’s an iconic, beautiful and incredible song, the lyrics have this bittersweet longing and desire that I think a lot of people can relate to. There’s regret in there, because the protagonist isn’t doing what he wants to do and it’s a perfect pop song in some ways. I was ten years old when my parents first took me to a concert and it was a Glen Campbell show. He was a big TV star with a network television show, it was a big tour and he was incredible. I didn’t know anything about concerts but I remember there were ten thousand people at The Dane County Coliseum, it was a massive show and it was eye-opening. I was probably seven or eight years old when I first heard ‘Wichita Lineman’. My Mum played music in the house all the time and music was part of the background of growing up in our household. She bought Beatles records, The Tijuana Brass, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, musicals like Oklahoma and West Side Story, Polka and Country records. She played everything and I was exposed to all of it, it was good for me growing up to be exposed to a diverse catalogue of music, I’ve never felt elitist about music."

"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."