"I don't want to sound like a broken fucking record but I've gotta go Simple Minds and Sons And Fascination. I've always picked Empires And Dance, but I keep switching to Sons And Fascination. If I remember rightly it was produced by Steve Hillage, so you could see the direction they were going in: he'd been and gone and was a real mainstay of the 70s prog scene, and it just shows the ambition of this band at that point in time. They'd been Johnny & The Self-Abusers, the quintessential proto-punk band, and then they'd done their first album which is kind of still punk-ish or punk-inspired. And then you realise there's a sea change, where they realise it's not the language they wanna speak. Sons And Fascinations comes after Empires And Dance, and working with Steve Hillage was symbolic of them wanting to explore something in themselves. I think if a posh lad reinvents himself and explores avenues he gets a plaudit for it, but rock & roll history is littered with lots of working class lads that have really reinvented the wheel and reinvented themselves and they've searched for things which should have been out of their reach. And they never get the credit for it. Simple Minds are another band that happened to. This album is full of pure, post-abstract expressionism. 'In Trance As Mission', 'Sweat In Bullet', '70 Cities As Love Brings The Fall', 'Boys From Brazil, 'Love Song'. 'Love Song!' Amongst all that! A fucking amazing white Scottish pop-dance record with an industrial backbone. Not many people achieve that kind of mash-up or fusion in their lives. They were concurrently making Sister Feelings Call at the same time. Another band who got pilloried for being pretentious. But they were working class boys who were just reaching for pretension and saying, "No, we will not be fucking defined by you. This is what we're doing. Go fuck yourselves." I've been listening to Sons And Fascination again, and it's just a crowning, towering achievement for a bunch of working class boys from Glasgow, because they weren't allowed to do it; they weren't supposed to do it. People told them to fuck off and they said, "No, we're gonna do it, and we're gonna do it better than anybody else."

"I think I was definitely one of the people who saw an excerpt on Tomorrow's World on Kraftwerk in 1975, and they were saying this is the mental, extreme edge of music, where they're doing it all with electronics and Kraftwerk were just about the only band who did this. Before The Human League, you would have heard 'Autobahn' on the radio occasionally, and maybe 'The Model', but that's about it, if you were lucky. And it was looked upon as really out there. It's more naturally linked with classical music, synth-pop, whereas rock & roll came from a different branch of music. I don't think I actually bought The Man Machine until I was 14 or 15, probably six or seven years after it was released. There's an awful lot of records that I love that I didn't really give a proper listen to until I was in my early twenties. I think there's a lot of fear in music, and listening to music, and a lot of people not wanting to go outside of their comfort zone. I remember when I was 12 or 13, my elder brother listening to some very strange music that he would have heard off John Peel or something, and I would half listen out of the corner of my ear and then run away, because it was so alien to me! It's only with time and with age and experience that you let yourself listen to things that would've sent you running in the old days. I've seen them live twice. The first time, I think I almost wet myself, it was at Tribal Gathering in 1997. It was the first time they'd performed in years and it was like a whole generation had come through absolutely worshipping Kraftwerk and suddenly they were back on the scene. The five minutes in that steaming tent were just the most exciting moments - the whole crowd was just feeling and waiting that this is finally going to happen after years and years. Then the curtains finally opened with the vocoder'ed voice and everybody just completely wet themselves - brilliant! They really give it some on stage, don't they - show men! It's all pretty static, but you wouldn't want it any other way."

"I've been listening a lot to that record lately. My desire to be a musician started with my love with his band. My first exposure to him was probably Caribou, because my friends had it. My dad got me Elton John's Greatest Hits, then I think I discovered Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Madman Across the Water, Captain Fantastic... And later on, I started to dig back, that's when I really got into Tumbleweed Connection. It's got a real kind of Americana into it. I think, it’s my impression, that Elton has a kind of a love affair with America. Maybe some kind of country music elements in that, as well as pop and rock & roll. And it just has a southern feel to me. ‘Country Comfort’ and ‘Amoreena’ are two of my favourite songs in that record, they're just so fucking well done. I'd met Elton a handful of times and he's always been a very knowledgeable guy, very interested in the band. He's asking you about certain tracks, and this and that like he's actually listening to our stuff, the kind of shit an assistant's not telling him before he walks in. I kind of learned this around the time he ended up recording for our song [‘Black Gives Way To Blue’]. He's a big fan of Alice In Chains. He keeps up on what comes out in all sorts of music as a fan himself, very fucking knowledgeable. You know, to ask a guy who's your number one musical inspiration to play in one of your songs... that means the world to you. We never expected him to say yes, but you don't know unless you ask. So I wrote him a little e-mail, explaining the significance of that song, especially through what we were moving out of, that we wanted to honour Layne, that we wrote that song as a making peace and saying ""goodbye my best friend"", and moving on with the band, to live a new chapter of the same book. That itself was huge, and then for Elton to listen to that song, and get that, like: ""I wanna be a part of that, I think it's a beautiful song. The emotion is very genuine, and I want to play piano on it."" Pretty mind-bungling stuff. One of the coolest things that has ever happened to me and to the band."