"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."

"They were in my opinion one of the best West Coast bands from the 70s. I got this album around 1970; I can't remember what year it came out, 68 or 69, something like that. It's got one or two unbelievable tracks on it: 'Ice' and the title track. Both are amazing instrumental pieces which are really like nothing I'd ever heard before. They're jazzy but they have a flavour, a rhythm of something else. Some of the songs are okay and some of the songs are a bit silly. I had a little square Dansette and a tiny room when I was a kid and the room was twice the size of the bed, and I used to lie on my bed with the speaker next to my ear. And I remember it being very hot and listening to that album and feeling like the music had captured the heat in a way that no other music that I'd heard actually did. So I always associate it with heat. And I always figure that if somebody knows about Spirit then they probably know quite a lot about music. And the guy who produced it is the guy who later went on to produce Carole King, and he was interviewed for the NME. At the time Carole King was regarded as being super unhip, and the journalist said oh, you produced the Spirit album; they were fantastic. And the guy said oh, I didn't really understand the music, which I thought was stupidly disingenuous, because actually he brought a really interesting touch to it."

"When I got into psychedelic music in my late teens and early twenties this was one of those songs that left a big impression on me. It’s not a song that would have been on a Nuggets collection or anything, it was quite a big song. It wasn’t a rare find or an unusual one-hit wonder, but the melody in it still blows me away. “It’s very, very British-sounding. There’s something very whimsical about it and there’s a little darkness in there but it’s incredibly uplifting - just the chords, the way it’s played and everything about it. It’s definitely been an inspiration when it comes to writing chord changes for me. “The Zombies have an incredible collection of songs so it’s very hard to choose just one, but apart from ‘Time of the Season’ this is a track where I would’ve been “Wait, how do I know this song?” There’s no pretentiousness to ‘Care of Cell 44’. or any of their songs in fact. There’s something very honest about it. Even though they’re very musically-minded and clever, it’s not distracting to listen to. It leaves you intrigued, more than bewildered. “Some bands get too clever with their chord changes, to the point where they’re not memorable, all of the sections of this song work so well together, but it’s not straight-up. It’s a pop song but there’s definitely some underlying eeriness to it. I don’t know whether it’s just the chords or the way it’s recorded. Maybe it’s something in the reverbs as well - the chambers, they just sound so good"