"The first heard time I heard Roxy Music I was smitten. I was in a record store and I asked the guy ‘What are you playing?’ They used to put the record jackets on the front desk, I picked it up and they looked like a band from outer space. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but I loved everything about it, ‘Virginia Plain’ was just an incredible sounding song. It’s the way the synthesiser bends at the start, then the songs kicks in and Bryan Ferry’s singing is so over the top and melodramatic, I’m not even sure what he’s singing about. There’s those breaks where they jam in the middle, the keyboard and synth solos. It was the sonic template, it sounded completely otherworldly to me. I felt a kinship with Roxy Music. I grew up listening to The Who and The Beatles and they were rock stars, but I felt Roxy Music were sort of my peers. With a lot of the new wave and punk bands I thought ‘I can do this, I can be in bands and do what they’re doing.’ It didn’t sound anything like the classic rock records I’d been listening to, it was arty, very flamboyant and kind of crude in a way. It was a bit pretentious but I liked that, I found it really fresh at the time that they had an art-school approach to the music and yet the music was very DIY, it wasn’t slick. They were great musicians but didn’t sound like virtuoso bands like Yes or Emerson, Lake and Palmer, though I did have some ELP records too! I fell in love with Roxy Music, I bought all their records, their solo records and live bootlegs. I was the self-appointed president of the Roxy Music fan club in Madison, there were only seven members. For a couple of years, once every two months we’d have a ‘Roxython’ on a Saturday night until the sun came up, we’d play their albums and dress up in very flamboyant clothes. It was great."