"They were very theatrical. Alex Harvey was 40 something, he was an old guy. And - at the time - that was ancient for rock n roll. He won the Scottish Tommy Steele competition in 1957. The prize? Meeting Tommy Steele! What a bizarre business. That was two years before I was born and he must have been in his late teens/early 20s by then. To be in your early 40s and starting out was unheard of. David Bowie and Alex Harvey knew each other, actually: they bonded over a shared love of Jacques Brel. 'Faith Healer' is one of the best things that ever came out of the 70s. And the end triplet of 'Last Of The Teenage Idols' – which is about the competition that he won. That was amazing. I loved his voice: he screamed his way through life. His version of 'Crazy Horses' is hilarious. He did a song called 'There's No Lights on the Xmas Tree Mother… They're Burning Big Louis Tonight'. It was about a guy in the electric chair who takes all the power off the grid on the night of his death. Nobody in this little town in America gets the Xmas lights. What a brilliant idea for a song. It was theatrics and bravado. Alex Harvey was off kilter - it wasn't like The Sweet or Mud, he was musically brilliant."

"This was the great danger of me picking these records - that they'd all come from 1974, but that was when I was most enthusiastic about buying records. And Marquee Moon… I just played it over and over and over again. I just love it. US punk was very different [to UK punk]; over here, the concept of it was absolutely fantastic, and that was the whole thing that got me into it, but it was a bit one dimensional. The Ramones were great, but they were kind of a caricature - a cartoon band. And a lot of punk over here seemed to go for that, as a backlash against over sophistication. I just felt that Marquee Moon and the stuff from New York was odd, and it was different, and it was weird - and I always liked weird thing. It still had a lot of energy; I liked Marquee Moon in preference to, say, Patti Smith's Horses… it was just contrived enough. Any further and it would be too pretentious. It's still great today; as soon as I put it on and hear those first few bars of 'See No Evil', it reminds me of when it first came out and I played it non-stop. Although imagine my disappointment when I bought Adventure on the red vinyl and tried desperately to like 'Foxhole', and it didn't happen."