"I got that record from my brother-in-law for Christmas - we have this huge family and so we were picking names from a hat and whoever you got the name of you bought a present for. My brother-in-law was this cool fucking dude who listened to college radio and he got me that first Clash record and I got to see them later that year so I guess it was Christmas 1978. We had the US version, it was just called The Clash with the green cover – you knew that if you were American, 'cos we were like, ""we cant get the real fucking English version"" - I mean they had it on import, but it was so expensive. I don’t know what my musical life would have been like if I didn’t get to see that gig. It was really exotic for that band to come and play Seattle. The whole Seattle community was there and it was probably only 200 people but it felt like everybody in the world was there. I remember there was this wooden barrier and this security guy in front of the pit who didn’t know how to deal with a punk rock audience, and he just decked this kid and broke his nose and The Clash just stopped the gig. And Paul Simonon or someone grabbed an axe and broke down the barrier! And I remember Joe Strummer saying, ""there’s no difference between us and you guys, these barriers and shit are separating us"", and it suddenly dawned on me. They were totally against the whole rock star thing, like there’s not us and there’s you, it was like we were all in this together. I guess I’d be lying if I said in the nineties I didn’t have… not ‘punk rock guilt’ exactly, but there would be a lot of bands that came up, like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, there were guys who were in the punk rock scene and this was what was next, and as a young dude you feel a little guilty when you’re suddenly selling millions of records. But no-one sold their soul or changed their fucking tune, this was what evolved out of punk rock. Looking back it was a natural progression. Guns was a mix of a lot of different input, punk rock, seventies rock, and it was about doing something different and maybe that’s what punk rock sounded like at that point, I don’t know (laughs). I mean Guns was as DIY as it got, we would hitchhike 1,200 miles to get to a gig but we just went to the next level in getting a major label deal, that was the big change. But I took that ethic with me that Strummer had said. I don’t know any different, I’m honoured to be playing gigs and I’ve always paid tribute to that way of thinking."

"I remember hearing Johnny Appleseed and being like, ‘Yo! This is another level.’ It’s got like this Caribbean rhythm, acoustic guitars and simple harmonies, and him talking about everything from ’49 Buicks – which I knew everything about – to Martin Luther King tand even the old folklore of Johnny Appleseed. I really related to everything he was saying. When he asks in the song ‘Do you hear what I’m saying?’ I was like ‘Yeah dude, I do hear what you’re saying.’ There’s that question that he poses, too: ‘Is what was once true now no longer so?’ I still carry that line around with me today. That song shaped another facet of me as well, because it showed me that you could still play music with punk energy but you don’t have to play punk songs. It showed me that you could be political and social and talk about relationships or whatever, and still have the forcefulness of punk rock without playing aggressive music. And I don’t have no time to spike my hair up. That’s more show to me. At the time I was like, ‘I can only afford one shirt. Why the hell would I rip it up? If I rip it up and it rains then I’m gonna get wet.’ I’ve always tried to stay in that thing that it’s not about what you look like: it’s about what you do. You have to believe it and you have to mean it."

"I'd heard of Andy Warhol, but I'd never heard The Velvet Underground until David Bowie talked about them in interviews in the NME, and of course Transformer. I'd rather talk about Transformer than the banana album actually, because Transformer sums up the era. I do believe that Mick Ronson was very instrumental - like a classically trained musician as well as a gorgeous rock god lead guitarist. His arrangement abilities for both Ziggy Stardust and Transformer have not been fully recognised in the history of pop music. I don't think David would've broke through without that. I remember dancing to 'Vicious' in a nightclub called Masquerade in Liverpool - a really eccentric gay bar full of diesel dykes, prostitutes and older gay men with dyed black hair and toupees. It was a strange netherworld hidden up a back alley that embraced a bunch of freaks of my generation like Pete Burns and me, Jane Casey, who wore too much make-up. That was the thing about a gay club, you were safe almost in there. A strange refuge. I suppose in a way, punk kind of helped that. Absolutely. One minute you were queer on the street, the next minute you were a punk. It normalised that sort of behaviour really, you know; ""Oh, they're just punks"", and it was a diversion away from sexuality. Punk was strangely non-sexual. Even the main protagonist John Lydon had something of a 'neither here nor there' about him."

"Really Red are from Texas and they released Teaching You The Fear in 1981. My friend Smithy and I had a fanzine called Attack and that was one of the records that came through. Our first band Mr. Epp eventually played with them. There's a lot going on in that band for a so-called hardcore punk band. There was a lot of cool stuff coming out of Texas in the early 80s like Big Boys and The Dicks, a little later the Butthole Surfers. Really Red was quite a political band. So many political punk bands were really strident like Crass but in the wake of Maximumrocknroll fanzine many of them were 16-year-old kids spouting shit about stuff they didn't really understand. And who wants to take advice from someone with a very small worldview? Really Red were a little older, maybe five to eight years older than me, and I know this because Ronnie Bond eventually moved up to Seattle and I got to know him a little. Those guys were old enough that when The MC5 came through Houston in the early 70s they hung out with them. Really thoughtful guys but most importantly kick-ass songs. Kelly Younger was a really unique guitar player. They also referenced Nico and The Velvet Underground as well as political punk stuff. They just seemed a little broader than a lot of things that were happening at the time in the hardcore scene in particular."

"When I heard this I was just completely floored. I was like 'What the fuck is this?' [Laughs]. Radio was amazing, it was so good. Similarly to Public Enemy, I heard this album and I wanted to know how he did it – I just had no idea how. He was talking my language and speaking to me but in styles I had never heard or experienced before. I wanted to know how he did this. The whole album is fire; the beats were hard and the rhymes were hard. It banged and undoubtedly became the sound of a generation. It was almost like punk rock in sentiment, urban punk rock which is effectively what hip hop is. It didn't matter which part of the world you were from either when you listened to this. The people that got this record were all going through the same shit. The worlds might have been somewhat different, but it was the same oppressive shit and it united people."