"Magazine were also one of my favourite bands and that they came from the same city as me was a marvel. It didn't make any difference to what I thought of their music, but it was definitely a bonus. As a teenager I was very critical at the state of guitar playing and the usual cliché-ridden approach that was either blues rock or prog rock. It didn't mean anything to my generation. In John McGeoch, Magazine had a guitar player who was modern and relevant and interesting, while Howard Devoto was, and still is, one of my favourite ever lyricists. There is a thought that the first couple of records for many bands are the ones that are considered seminal. As is the case with Wire, I think that when bands break away from their first seminal albums - in Magazine's case that was Real Life and Secondhand Daylight - and they take somewhat of a left turn, it is really interesting. On The Correct Use Of Soap, Magazine did something original and almost ahead of themselves. There is a lot of space on The Correct Use Of Soap and I think it is better than the first two records. The space means that John McGeoch can really stretch out. Songs like 'Philadelphia' and 'Because You're Frightened' are based on guitar-playing that is utterly unique. It is one of those records that you can say that if it came out now, it would still not only be fresh but ahead of the race."

"I know these are things that go back in time, but now coming up to date, we got 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now, the projecting forward of Arthur C. Clarke was just such a marvel of imagination, but not just guessing. I mean, he predicted that communication satellites would rotate at the same rate that the earth rotates. They’re in orbit traveling, so they sort of remain stationary over the equator. Now, that was a brilliant observation, and I think so many of these people — Isaac Asimov and H.G. Wells, all of these science fiction writers. In a way, it prompted me to think about creating imaginary situations in the past, in the present, and off into the future, being as true to reality as possible. It also predicted things that we would call today… It’s a cable that goes all the way up and out to geosynchronous. And that has fascinated a lot of people, and I’ve appreciated some engineering observations that I think were quite impractical, but Arthur Clarke projected building a tower all the way out there. 22,000 miles. Now, that’s pretty stretching. But I feel very satisfied since Arthur Clarke wrote an epilogue to the book that Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and I wrote with other people, First on The Moon, and Arthur Clarke wrote the epilogue to that. And because of his contributions and my appreciation of those and having met him on several occasions, I just was compelled to arrange a cruise so that I would get to spend a day with Arthur Clarke in 2001."