"I was turned on to Prince sometime around 1980. I really love For You and Prince and Controversy and Dirty Mind, but there was something about 1999. A lot of heroin was going through Seattle, and while I wasn't using, a lot of people were getting strung out: my friends, my roommate, my girlfriend, my band. We had just signed to Jello Biafra's record label and were going to be the next big thing, but a couple of the guys got strung out and it was the end of the band. It was 10 Minute Warning, who were a precursor to Soundgarden and Green River and all of that. I was heartbroken, man, seeing all this stuff going on around me, and I knew I had to make a decision. Then 1999 came out in 1982, and I just dove into the record. I loved Little Red Corvette. It may be the most perfect three-chord song ever written. But it was the deeper tracks that I loved most. I would get off work and come home and just play the record and it was my escape. Everybody has that record that 'saved their life', and 1999 gave me the courage to stand on my own two feet. It gave me the courage to leave. I knew my car wouldn't make it to New York, but I knew it could get me to LA. Somehow it encouraged me to do that on my own, and it was scary, but I knew music was going to be my thing."

"I was 10 years old and I didn’t listen to rock ‘n’ roll. I was at a friend’s house and we were playing Warhammer, because I’m cool, and his older brother had an Iron Maiden poster and I thought it was very cool. It grabbed me and I didn’t realise it was for a band. I mentioned it to my parents and about a week later my dad brought me a copy of Killers on cassette from the Our Price at Waterloo Station. I can still remember hearing the opening track. It was like a switch flipping in my head. It was immediately apparent that this was my thing. Rock ‘n’ roll arrived very suddenly and forcefully in my life. One of the things I love about Maiden still, is that they are resolutely impervious to fashion. They’re just Maiden, they have always been Maiden and they don’t give a f*** You can take a lot of my records away from me, but I’ve got a lot of collector’s edition boxsets of Maiden and I would fight for them harder than most things in my possession. One of the things I love about Maiden still is that they are resolutely impervious to fashion. They’re just Maiden, they have always been Maiden and they don’t give a fuck. There’s something punk about that. They weren’t cool in 1980, they weren’t cool in 1990, they weren’t cool in 2000 and they weren’t cool in 2010, but they still go about what they do selling out arenas all over the world."

"I'm loyal to Weather Report's vision. I can understand how some people come in through the wrong door with them. This album is from a point where they're coming out of this improvisational period. Their first few albums were really exploratory and you had to be quite committed to them; they weren't instant records. But they had plenty of acclaim and backing from their record label. It's amazing that there was a point in time when record labels backed that kind of music. But this was the point when they were playing a lot of colleges and they added a more funky span to what they were doing. So the bass guitar started to get more prominent. It was Alphonso Johnson playing bass here and not Jaco Pastorious, and people forget that Alphonso Johnson did a lot of the groundbreaking stuff for the fretless bass. There's a painterly quality about this album and the orchestration gets more densely textured. You've got tracks like 'Jungle Book', that closes the album, and it's a beautiful track that could be put together by coloured pencils. It's a very pastel-y track where they've taken an improvisation and drawn round and over the top of it. Tracks like that are really funky. We didn't have ""world music"" back then, but this was the beginnings of that idea; of something beyond the horizon of our culture and something that was kind of hidden. It wasn't about doing an authentic version of ethno-musicology, but taking different elements; it was all about colours."

"I produced this track, so that’s one of the reasons why I put it in here and “The Cutter” was one of those songs that meant a lot to me, because they were my mates. We’d all talked about being in bands and we’d all been in bands together - even though half of them had never had a rehearsal! When Echo & The Bunnymen actually did rehearse, you could instantly see the chemistry from the very start. There was just three of them with a drum machine at first, but right from the start it was very special. I was shocked actually, I remember being shocked at how good it was. I’d never produced a record and I had no ambition to be a producer, so it was a real surprise when they asked me to produce a track. “The Cutter” was the breakthrough track, we’d done “The Back Of Love” which had made it to Top Of The Pops and was in the top twenty, but “The Cutter” took it to another level. When I worked with them it was a bit different because they were my mates, so I almost joined the band really. I played a bit of guitar and put in the middle-eights with Ian. I feel like a lot of myself went into that tune, and when it became a hit for them it was a really big moment. I think it made me feel like I could do something, I didn’t know what, but it made me feel like I could."