"This was the first Ramones song I heard. I was nineteen or twenty years old and I’d read about them in New Yorker Magazine and alternative music magazines like Village Voice and Trouser Press. They were getting all this press but they weren’t getting any radio play in Wisconsin, so you had to wait until it came into the record store to hear it and I was smitten the first time I heard ‘Blitzkrieg Bop.’ I bought their record and it just floored me in its simplicity, two minutes or a minute and thirty renditions of songs that were verse, chorus, verse, chorus, chorus, end of song. The songs were super precise and cut down to the bare bone, they were pop songs and had a very crude simplicity to the recordings. I think I went through three vinyl copies of their first record. I’d get up in the morning and play it twice before I’d go to the university and then I’d come back at night and just blast it non-stop. We’d have these punk rock party nights just listening to The Ramones album and ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ always set the tone for me, it’s an incredible song. We’d bring all our friends over, get kegs of beer, clear all the furniture out of our living room and jump up and down and slam-dance. The first Ramones record is the greatest punk rock record of all time, it inspired The Sex Pistols, it inspired everybody. A thousand punk rock bands were formed after they saw The Ramones, they were the first true originals to do that and I’m still a huge Ramones fan."

"I kept reading about punk, but the local radio station wouldn’t play punk; they didn’t think it was real music. That led to me one of the musical discoveries of my life. One night, I really wanted to hear what this punk music was and, turning the radio dial, I heard John Peel’s radio show. I started listening to it and taking songs off there all the time, and that became my musical education. It made me want to form a group; the early Pulp were really just a ragbag of the influences that we’d picked up from listening to John Peel’s show every night. The first Devo album came out that year [in 1978], and I went to see them play at the City Hall in Sheffield, which was quite influential. One of the first songs that Pulp learned how to play was the Devo song “Gut Feeling.” A couple of years later, when we first did some recordings, I took them to John Peel—he used to do these road shows at colleges, and I just went along to the one he did in Sheffield and hung around and gave him the tape after when he was putting all his records back into his DJ box at the end. He listened to it on the way home, and that really changed my life. Then he gave us a session [in 1981]. We were all still at school. I was 16 or maybe just 17, and the drummer was 15 and he looked about 12. He could hardly reach the bass drum pedal to play the drum."