"Look, X-Ray Spex is amazing, I could talk about them all day, but I put The Slits, because sonically nothing sounds like them and nothing will ever sound like them again. Their harmonies, the drums, Budgie, Palmolive, oh god, where do you start with The Slits? I mean their name is The Slits. To be 14-years-old in that scene, just to create what they made? If you look at The Sex Pistols at that time, they were a prefabricated band, but not The Slits. The lyrics are so good. They're another one of those bands where it's on every level. Every single layer is so creative and interesting and incredible. It's really multi-faceted. From their personalities, to their feminism, to the politics, which were wishy-washy in this crazy way, but sonically, nothing sounds like that. It was primitive. It was really provocative, it really provoked society and it was so cool. You can't compare anything to The Slits."

"Lots of metal bands had all got a little bit in a rut by the time this came out. People were quite bothered about how they looked. And NIrvana smashed it to pieces. They said music should be raw and powerful – great guitar riffs, good lyrics, great melodies. Nirvana were the ones. And Kurt Cobain was charismatic. A lot of musicians resented grunge, but I quite liked it – we needed it. Saxon never went grunge – we went more metal again in the 90s. We had really needed a rest, but we couldn’t have one, and we weren’t firing on all cylinders. It wasn’t ‘til the 90s that we got our shit together again. Nirvana resonates for me because of that. It took people by surprise, because it went so big so quickly. There’s a lot of menace and darkness in and it was heavier than what other people were doing at the time."

"Kurt Cobain talked about punk a lot even though everyone spoke about Nirvana being a grunge band, which I found quite confusing at the time. So I asked a friend of mine’s uncle about what punk was and I went out and got the first Clash record and the Sex Pistols. I was kind of into that, and then the '90s American skate punk thing arrived in my life. It’s a complex record, but it’s a really fun, poppy record at the same time Green Day and The Offspring were the gateway bands and I got heavily into NOFX, Pennywise and all that stuff, but the record that really sticks with me is Everything Sucks. It’s fast, it’s hard, it’s heavy but it’s also melodic as well. It’s a complex record, but it’s a really fun, poppy record at the same time. I listened to it yesterday. It’s a masterpiece of punk rock. It was my gateway into underground punk rock"

"The way their styles went back and forth was some sick street shit. Their beats were ill and they had like a slur, a slang style going on that resonated with so many people on the street. When I first heard 'You're A Customer' I was hooked; every single record was so tight and so completely banging. I think they had four or five gold records in a straight row which was such an incredible achievement. They were on some ill roll that just continued. They also listened to the dopest shit too and you could tell that from listening to their music. As well as being influenced by so much themselves, they influenced a lot of people too. Bands like us, Public Enemy, Run-D.M.C were just talking about EPMD so much. Back then, you had to make music that sounded real because if you didn't, people just saw straight through that shit. Most motherfuckers didn't make it but then artists like EPMD showed you how."

"This is another circumstantial choice from my long drive across America. Some of the tracks on this are twenty minutes long and perfect for a seven hour drive! It's good to have that time to let a song build and, because they are metronomic and electronic, it's great travelling music. There's a song called 'Patchwork' that Kliph played over and over again. It's maybe a portal into the records I've been listening to over the past decade, bands like Emeralds. I've got kids of various ages and records like these are compromise records because I can put them on to get them to sleep and I also like listening to them, though one baby didn't react to meditative music and I had to put on head-banging music to get them to sleep. I could head bang away! I listen to a lot of instrumental music in the house, loudly. I enjoy not having a voice to interfere with my day."