"I really like songs that are storytelling in a way and The Kinks are great at that. “Waterloo Sunset” in particular sparked a lot of images in my mind about how you write songs and the way that melodies flow. “I think the best songs make you feel a certain way, and it’s a bit more than just the lyric really. The lyrics for “Waterloo Sunset” are brilliant but the song makes you feel like there’s a longing for a lost moment. I love the idea of two people meeting in a crowd, but with the whole atmosphere of the song, as soon as I hear it, I slip back into it and it just overwhelms me. ""There’s also a beautiful lost story within the song, the tale of a city and a river. I read that Ray Davies originally called it “Liverpool Sunset”, from when he was on tour in Liverpool and then later he changed it. “I was pretty obsessed with music from when I was quite young, and I still listen to music an awful lot. I don’t listen to these songs much anymore, but when I hear them, I love them. I think on my musical journey and absorbing that stuff, The Beatles and The Kinks were very much the beginning of it. I’m definitely sticking in an era here!"

"The title is like an artificial title, but it’s Bert Williams, Lime Kiln Club Field Day. It’s actually a film that was never completed. MoMA found it in its vault in reels of production from 1913 featuring Bert Williams, who was the most important entertainer of his era. He’s the first crossover African-American star. He was a recording artist, Vaudeville performer, and he made a number of films with the Biograph company. Some shorter ones survived, but this was a longer production. Fortunately, MoMA discovered his material. They actually put together a cut of it, so that we get a sense of the story. Bert Williams plays this kind of town comic idea, down on his luck a lot of the time, and he and two other guys who are much more sophisticated are competing for the top affection of the local beauty. It’s a lot of comic sequences where they’re trying to take each other out of the running. The film features all of the most important black theatrical performers of the day. It’s just been a revelation to see this, because now we get to see the performance styles of these figures that up ’til now, we’ve only had still images of them and, maybe in some cases, some of the scenarios that they performed in. It’s incredible."

"They were one of, if not the first, rock & roll male bands that I was really attracted to. I am definitely a female-orientated person, that's just the way I am. I don't go gaga over every single male rockstar that comes out, I sort of tend to be way more interested in the female narrative. But who can resist The Clash? [Laughs] even I could not resist The Clash. 

 I was thrilled by the sound and also the style; they felt like a real gang to me. It really captured my imagination and I wanted to be in The Clash. They still are, arguably, one of the coolest male rock bands of all time, if not the coolest rock band of all time. There's not anybody really that touches them. I love the political bias in their writing and I love the raucousness of it – and I thought they were fucking hot as fuck [laughs]. 

 Again, just amazing songs. Like, I associate 'Rock the Casbah' with a lot of great parties that I went to around about that time. There was a lot of finger-fucking going on to The Clash, an innocent but erotic memory. My sexuality was beginning to really explode when I discovered The Clash so I always associate it with that kind of hotness. It's just The Clash equals hotness. End of story."

"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."

"That one was going to be the last track on the album, so we had to leave an emotional impact there. It wasn't hard to think like that, given the subject of the song. With a lot of Bowie's songs, you found you were not only being a musician, but a bit of an actor as well. You had to get in there and use your imagination at the same time as your drumming skills to communicate those lyrics with any sort of conviction. You didn't want to say: 'Go out and commit suicide', of course, so you had to find a way of playing it so it didn't communicate that but rather identified with how someone like that might feel at the end of the world – that whole concept. It's one of my favorite tracks. It doesn't need a lot from the drums, bass and guitar. There are times when it breaks down to just the bass drum, and that bass drum needs to be played with despair. So, it was interesting as an emotional song to play. Everything seemed to leave it hanging on that bass drum, so you couldn't play it flippantly. It was how you emotionally felt and getting that across with just your foot on the drum pedal. You look back on that track and think it was pretty risky – especially on his part!"

"I think Combat Rock has suffered a lot of bitching and whining because it’s when The Clash broke America. I was 17-years old when I heard 'Should I Stay Or Should I Go'. I wasn’t some hipster, punk dude. I didn’t know who The Clash were. I heard it on the radio. I heard 'Rock The Casbah' on the radio. Compared to a lot of other stuff being played it was like: “This is good!” For all the people who say it’s not London Calling, it’s not 'White Riot', well, I get that they were in the trenches and whatever. I’m not trying to disparage the early Clash but they matured into a proper rock band and they did something with it. Listen to 'Straight To Hell'. Fucking A! Listen to 'Know Your Rights'! I’ll be happy as a pig in shit if I can write a song as good as that. If they were ‘selling out’, you write 'Know Your Rights'! It’s why I picked Combat Rock. I don’t get where people are coming from who don’t like that record [sings the riff from 'Should I Stay Or Should I Go']. It doesn’t get any better than that. It’s a wonderful statement. I wish there was something out there right now as good as 'Straight To Hell'."

"I think when we were kids it was all about Sgt. Pepper’s. There were a few albums that my dad had that we played a lot and that was one of them; we didn’t get far beyond that. And then when I eventually started listening to the old, old stuff, I didn’t like it so much. I realise that the innovations that they made composition-wise coloured all of pop music and a lot of rock as well – it coloured all of music really! But I wasn’t into it, not into listening to it. But then I decided to educate myself on The White Album, and I used it for everything: walking, working out etc. And I love it. I actually saw some footage of Paul McCartney doing ‘Helter Skelter’ recently and thought he really nailed it – I think he still does that song really well. I just love The White Album and I prefer it to all the other Beatles stuff. I can’t explain it though. I don’t even especially like any of the songs, it’s just that as a listening experience you can find yourself immersed in it while running on a treadmill as much as you can laying in your bed. It’s really versatile. I love all the Beatles’ stuff and it’s all eclectic, but I think this album is even more so."

"If I could pick a song that I could go back in time and write, this is it. I think it's a perfect composition from start to finish, the melody to the drum groove, it’s really hard man. I think if I was to play that drum groove on its own a lot of people would think how does this fit into anything? And the fact this man's made this love song, that can be played in soundsystems, you can listen to it at home, it's so like transferable and I just love that about it. There's no right or wrong place to play it. I could play this at my wedding, I could play this if I’m going through a break up and I’m at home on my own, I could play this at a gig. I mean, for me it’s just a perfect song. And I think for the album, I was more concerned with writing songs than I was creating music for improvisation. I can do that, it wasn’t about trying to prove that, I want you to listen to this from start to finish, everything should be a great song. That was a good three and a half minutes. I was trying to get that with a lot of the tracks where it just takes you on this journey and that's a great example."