"I think “Pure” is a song that changed my life more than any other. I’d never really sung before or written any lyrics entirely by myself and it was kind of a first attempt. “To put it into context, at that time in Liverpool loads of bands were being signed by record companies and being given big deals. Bands like The La’s were all doing gigs and that’s how they got signed, but I couldn’t really do a gig because I didn’t have a band, so I just had my tunes. “I recorded about three or four tunes at home and during bits of downtime in a studio I produced in. It was a very tentative try, but there was a publisher guy who said, ‘I’d love to hear those songs’ and I played them to him and he said ‘We should put this out’. I said, ‘I don’t have a group and we haven’t got a label’ and he basically got some copies printed up and put it out. “We had 500 copies pressed and released it through an indie label called Ghetto and nobody expected much to happen. I thought at least I would be getting a song out there, so it was very much an underdog type thing. “Pure” just hung around and then people started noticing it - we’d sell a few hundred copies and then they’d get some more made. Then DJ’s on stations started playing it and it was a very word of mouth thing. In the end John Peel played it a few times and spoke about it, but nobody really knew what it was, because nobody had seen us play. “It culminated in me getting a call from someone in America. This station in LA called K Rock phoned me in my Liverpool flat and said, ‘Your record is the most requested record in California for the last two months.’ It was like fairy story, and then they pressed up a load more, we finished the album and it was the start of The Lightning Seeds. “That song had a massive part to play for me in the whole way my life and career went. It was a brilliant moment and it started everything. I’d always thought that music was a form of magic, or alchemy or something and the idea that I could record this song in the top room of my house on a tape machine and that it could go out across the world seemed mad to me. I couldn’t believe it."

"I’d heard ‘Starman’ on the radio before going to school, and as most lads are, I was interested in football and outer space. Something about his voice and the opening line, just that thing he’d tapped into, and it was me he was suggesting to look out the window. It’s hard to comprehend the impact he had when he came out. I turned 13 in the May of ’72 and it was such a special time and gave my life magical class. I grew up in Norris Green, skint, and what he did was give the gift of inspiration. He changed the world in loads of ways and was probably the last great special person to do that. It was head and shoulders above anything else. To come out looking like that he could have had the biggest backlash. If you ever want to see star quality watch that Top Of The Pops clip, which is what gave me the idea that you need stage presence – you don’t just need it on stage, you need it in life. I missed those years of myself, in how naïve I was, and how un-laddy I was. I was into footy and stuff, but through the Bunnymen I found my own confidence. I was thinking of getting some bangles – thank God I didn’t. The thing about Bowie is that no-one else could have pulled it off. He was hardly ever on telly, and he never went on and mimed. It was just everything about it. People who missed it must’ve been stupid. I remember after Top Of The Pops going to school and asked my mates if they’d seen it and they said, “yeah – the fucking queer.” I didn’t even see that. I didn’t see it as a sexual thing, I wouldn’t have minded if I had have done. It made some sense because I was probably more androgynous than him through my teenage years – girls would ask me if I was a boy or a girl. I’d always tell them they could put their hands down me kecks and find out. When Bowie shaved his eyebrows off I knew something was up. That’s how you can pinpoint when Ziggy ends. His hair started to change and that’s when he stopped being so from-outer-space. I’m very exact on it, because it almost broke my heart. Without Bowie, obviously I’d have been centre-forward for Liverpool. It wouldn’t have been a bad career playing for Liverpool. I was a goal-hanging bastard. Fantastic shot, but I didn’t particularly like going into the 50-50s, the life-threateners. And my eyesight went to shite when I was 13."