"Frank Zappa's glorious Straight label gave us Captain Beefheart, Alice Cooper, the GTO's and this absurdly eclectic 1969 album by sardonic folk-blues-comedy-rock-cabaret belter Judy Henske and hubby Jerry Yester of the New Christy Minstrels and the Modern Folk Quartet. No two tracks sound like the same band (or even singer), thanks to Henske's radical versatility and Yester playing ten different instruments; but unlike the Turtles' equally perversely wide-ranging The Turtles Present The Battle Of The Bands, no track sounds much like anyone else either. "

"I listen to this record all the way through - even 'Moby Dick'. To me it encapsulates the Led Zeppelin sound, because the engineering on it is so magnificent. The fact that a four-piece band can sound so vast. Obviously there are great tracks on III and IV. But I feel that II is the most complete album. It's amazing to find out they recorded it mostly on tour. Extraordinary. It sounds like it was recorded in one room. I think it's accounted for by the fact they just sound like that. They just sound that magnificent. I was not a huge fan of the first album. I remember reading the story about how, I think it was Glyn Johns again, the story about him playing it to George Harrison, and George Harrison didn't really get it. I wonder if he had played him Zeppelin II he'd have got it. I is not my favourite. On II it felt fully realised. They'd pulled away from that influence of blues; it was still there, but they'd merged it into their own thing. Which again I think is something that people don't associate with Simply Red – we've been enormously influenced by African American music, but we've been influenced by it from a different era. The marriage between black and white started with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and George Gershwin and all these people that ran through music, right through to Elvis, to Jagger, to Robert Plant – we've all in our own ways been enormously influenced by African American music. But the real thing to celebrate is that we made something different out of it. We didn't just copy it. The British especially turned it into something else. It became what we now know as rock music. The Beatles and the Stones are the people who can justifiably claim to have invented what we know as rock music. Not rock & roll, not R&B, not blues, but rock. And that is something to celebrate."

"It's such a beautiful record. What can I say? Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman from The Byrds did these soul songs like 'Do Right Woman', which was originally recorded by Aretha Franklin and they played it like a country rock song. Also, they took like 'Dark End Of The Street', which was written by Dan Penn, originally for the soul singer James Carr on Goldwax, a Memphis label, which they also recorded in the style of a country rock song. Country rock is often a dirty term, but to turn that into something else, that transformation was incredible. Gram's gentle, soulful voice completely slays me every time! I'm in love with Gram Parsons. I feel like I know him. When I hear him sing, his voice fills me up and makes me feel loved. Admitting that you're broken and sad that a woman left you, feeling vulnerable was rare in music, apart from maybe soul and blues. But rock music was so macho. Gram turned up and wrote these beautiful original songs. It's okay to admit you're weak, it's okay to admit you have a broken heart. A huge influence on me and Primal Scream. Also, when I got married to my wife Katy England, I had Alexander McQueen design for myself and my wife a suit with satin lapels and hemmed embroidery in the trousers and jacket with roses, in tribute to Gram Parsons."

"I first heard this one in 2000, or maybe 2001. My girlfriend at the time, Eleanor, had a Bo Diddley compilation that I think she got from her brother. I was grown by then so it wasn’t like I was listening to Bo in the crib, you know? But I came around to it. ""For a long time, I wasn’t a fan of the blues, because my limited understanding of it was cover bands on Sixth Street here in Austin - that version of the genre was just white guys trying to imitate Stevie Ray Vaughan. I think Bo transcended blues though. There’s so much more going on; there’s pop elements, there’s pure rock and roll elements. ""What I love about him the most is that he’s all about the maracas. That’s something that I’ve snagged, for sure, they’re the coolest percussion instrument. He went on The Ed Sullivan Show with a four-piece band, and one of them was just there to play maracas - that’s how essential it was to the sound. On this song, Jerome himself is the maraca player and he’s singing the response vocal - singing his own name. I love that."

"That must have been high school. A video played before MTV was around [on Top Of The Pops], it was 'Bang A Gong (Get It On)', Elton John played on it and really it was another song. It wasn't 'Bang A Gong' and there was this moment where Marc Bolan jumped and it wasn't even on time, and I think, "That's fucking cool! Goddamn it, how cool is this?" Such a wiseass thing to do. Either that or I guess they wanted to play the album version and they probably didn't make a video at that time and they just slathered that on. His guitar has a kind of bluesy effect, obviously his lyrics and vocal style I like - [imitates Bolan] - and I just thought this was a cool, cool record. I feel cool when I listen to it - I feel like the coolest guy in the world, just as cool as shit! Bolan took the blues and made it a lot more palatable. I love blues music, but after a while it's like, "Aw man, here we go again!" That would be like water dripping on my head if I listened to that all day. I appreciate it, goddamn it, I do, but in small doses. The A minor pentatonic - one thing I learned from the blues is get the fuck away from that pentatonic scale! I played with Link Wray one time - I played one song with him, I forgot! - and his thing to me was: "Joey, I don't want to hear any pentatonics there", and I just went out, I didn't even practice, thinking, "I'll just wing it!" I went out there and got so nervous, I threw in a pentatonic scale! I hope he didn't hear me! And he went, "Come on Joe!" He wanted me to put my leg on the monitor, total rock star, and I was thinking, "I won't do this! Please don't make me do this!" And I did it! I just felt like a douchebag. And funnily enough, we were playing at the House Of Blues."

"For me this is possibly the greatest rock album of all time. It's a band playing at the absolute, height of their power. It's very ambitious: it's got elements of ska and funk, pop songs, soul, jazz, rockabilly, reggae - and in the end it's got this really great blues energetic vibe. It just seems like they tossed it off and lyrically it touches on a lot of different subjects. Some of the songs are very political: 'Spanish Bombs' is about the Spanish civil war, 'London Calling' itself - that song is such an anthem. The band had some commercial success after this album - with Combat Rock - but to me London Calling is the pinnacle of their song-writing. It is just a fantastic record with an iconic sleeve; that shot of Paul Simonon smashing his bass, it's just incredible. I saw The Clash play in Chicago when I was on tour and it was like electricity. They came out and they started with 'London Calling'. The place was rammed with 5,000+ people and it went OFF! It was as if a bomb dropped and it was one of the most exciting concerts I've ever seen!"

"In those days it was all singles. Bands would put out an album with all the singles on so you’d already heard most of it. But this was the first album with great guitar riffs that repeated themselves – AC/DC and The Kinks are definitely related. It had a great guitar sound for the time: a great riff with a great melody on top is the essence of rock music for me; you can’t get away from it, that distorted guitar with the great riff. They weren’t as bluesy as some of the others – they didn’t go to the 12-bar blues all the time, like some bands did. Ray Davies’ lyrics always appealed to me because they were so straightforward – they were always about life. Probably at the time I didn’t notice, but later everyone looked at his work more as poetry."

"This was my album of 1974, although it came out in 1973. I guess I was always catching up with Frank Zappa. The first album by him that I bought was Hot Rats, and I found that a rather irritating album of not very evolved guitar playing. Frank was a bit of a one-trick pony as a guitarist, but as a musician, arranger and bandleader of the traditional sort, he was at the top of the tree, although he wasn’t unique as a bandleader. There were by then other bandleaders in rock, blues and soul groups like BB King, James Brown and in England John Mayall. In America, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart were bandleaders of an apparently tough-cookie nature, although everyone who worked with Frank seems to have revered him as a musician and a person."

"I wanted to mention this record because it’s almost taken for granted in David Bowie’s canon as just ‘there’s another great Bowie track’, yet it gets overlooked by something like ‘Let’s Dance’ or ‘Heroes.’ “If this came out now I don’t think it’d have any chance on mainstream radio and I think that’s because - and this might be incredibly subjective - he does this amazing thing where he manages to be completely remote whilst leading this band. It’s a really genius performance, the way he pitches his vocal and his persona, it’s cold and remote, but yet really sexy and it’s got no earnestness in it whatsoever. It’s not inciting you to get up and rock like ‘Jailhouse Rock’ or any of the Elvis Presley records, which is someone wanting to dance with you or encouraging you to do that. “To use an obvious comparison about Bowie, this has a really alien position because the voice is so cold, but it’s perfectly Rock and Roll. And it’s really white I think, probably because I can picture him in my mind when it came out and you’d never seen anyone more white, but it’s also as low down and Rock and Roll as any of the blues records that came out. It’s interesting, it’s got that sexuality in it. “I was about ten when it was released and to me and a bunch of kids experiencing it then it was so modern, because of what Bowie’s doing on top of what is essentially a Yardbirds or a Muddy Waters riff and using ‘The Jean Genie’, which back then was such a hip kind of slang. It’s a play on Jean Genet and he’s describing bits he’d picked up from Iggy, but in the early 70s’ everything was ‘Ziggy’, ‘Iggy’, ‘Genie’ and people were called ‘Mick’ and ‘Stevie.’ “There was a very urban, street Rock and Roll that was quite illicit; the threat of drugs, danger, confused sexuality and super-androgyny and the character he’s singing about personifies that in the mind, which leads me to Iggy."