"“I think ‘Two lovers missing the tranquillity of solitude’ is one of my favourite lines ever written. ‘Days of speed and slow time Mondays / Pissing down with rain on a boring Wednesday’ – all that stuff, man. ‘Opening the windows and breathing in petrol.’ That was my life; we lived right by the gas station. I was like, ‘This sucks. I gotta get out of here.’ The song summed it all up perfectly. And it was all played on an acoustic guitar. I’d always look at the way that The Jam dressed, too. I’d say to myself, ‘Someday, I’m gonna be able to buy me them mod clothes, man.’ I still can’t afford them mod clothes, but whatever. I do my best! Anyway, after that was when I started getting into all the Sub Pop bands, like The Afghan Whigs."

"At this point I was playing in a hardcore band, I was listening to hardcore, I was going to hardcore shows, and at a certain point it started get a bit old for me. This album showed me a way of being intense and meaningful and indeed heavy without distorted guitars and taking your shirt off and screaming at the front row. It planted a seed which, when Million Dead broke up, flourished into what I do now There was also a simplicity to it, because I had got into the complicated end of hardcore and bands like Dillinger Escape Plan and Botch, and there was something about simple chords on an acoustic guitar that reminded me of listening to Counting Crows. It was powerful to me. It planted a seed which, when Million Dead broke up, flourished into what I do now."

"I saw Tinariwen by accident at the Cambridge Folk Festival some time in my early 20s. I had a massive hangover, so went to sit in the artists' bit at Cambridge, this bit on the side of the stage where you can see the bands play. I wasn't really paying attention to start with – it was a bad hangover– but slowly but surely this amazing this happened. I was draw in, then hooked in, then totally hypnotised by this music that crashed over me in my little fog. The music had so much forward momentum, and the guitars had so much space, it was like I was being taken off somewhere. It was the most transcendental experience. I love the textural stuff on this record especially – the different types of percussion, the clapping, the chorus singing. The whole thing ebbs and flows. 

"

"I was a weekend punk. It has got to be in the top ten best albums ever. It's one of those records that your parents would hate so you loved it. The whole rebel thing was the main thing. 'Pretty Vacant', when I first heard that I thought bloody hell... Again, my best friend, he was into The Sex Pistols before I was, and this was one of the first bands that he switched me over to, I thought "Yeah, they're pretty good". [laughs] We weren't early punks or anything, we weren't on the crest of it. We were in Basildon, Essex, so we were two years too late. I could never make a record like that, I wouldn't know where to start, so I have admiration for people who can do that kind of stuff"

"It's horribly sexist. It's almost like he hates women. I'm assuming he's grown up now and that's changed, but I wouldn't like to ask him. But you really get the feeling of how they struggled, and how they kept believing in themselves, and that's the great thing about it. He moved from Indiana, which must have been a fucking shit-hole. He gets to LA and is attacked in the bus station. It freaks him out. He jumps from one band to another, and that's how it should be. Nobody does that anymore, but it really influenced me. That's why I kept going. You meet these people and bands at festivals, and they've just come out of University, and you think, 'for fuck's sake!' You just want people to live it. And this song gives that out."