"I had been a rather reluctant punk as a teenager, finding the whole movement too aggressive for a Peterborough gay boy, so this I suppose more commercial offering from Siouxsie was much more up my street - and consequently, as with all my favourite teen angst albums, I learnt all of the songs inside out and backwards. Siouxsie has an incredible voice and was one of my first live concerts, alongside Joe Jackson. We were later to bump into her at Sire Records in NYC but I was too nervous and shy too say 'Hi'."

"This is kind of cheating because it’s a record that isn’t out yet. I think the first single comes out this week. This is the second record. I enjoyed the first record. It was okay, I’m not sure that it devastated me. But I was sent the new record and it absolutely fucked my mind. It is so good. Every generation has a punk record that is epochal, whether it be Dookie or The '59 Sound or whatever. If there’s any justice, this will be one of those records"

"Any film that propelled Gary Oldman to stardom is an important film, as I believe Oldman is the greatest film actor of his generation. The lives of the waifish/shrewish Nancy Spungeon and enfant terrible Sid Vicious make for a tough haul and present a somewhat jaundiced vision of the seventies punk scene. However, Sid and Nancy features director Alex Cox at the peak of his talent, cinematography by the great Roger Deakins, and a wonderful, damaged kookiness from Chloe Webb. But it’s the preternaturally gifted Gary Oldman you can’t take your eyes off of."

"In the early ’80s, Seidelman made two of the coolest movies ever made back-to-back. First came this urgent, spiky punk-rock fable—with its striving outsiders and crazy rhythms—and then the great Desperately Seeking Susan. Both present a vision of Manhattan as a broken, semi-lawless amusement park in deep decline—a version of New York City that was long gone by the time I arrived there in 1999. Watching Smithereens is like being teleported to a far-off planet that’s about to be colonized."

"More so than any of her records, again, I just find it one after another songs that just particularly move me... I'm very moved by the song 'The Man with the Child in his Eyes' - I love that song. So, it's funny, it's a lot about having children and at the time I first heard it, I had no idea that I'd ever have children. I always loved her - she seemed like a kind of punk rock folk singer to me, with that punk rock attitude, and that extraordinary voice and such beautiful songwriting and very diverse musicianship. This record for me is something that, in my teenage years, I was just engrossed in. I can't really take myself back there and say why, what started that. It was very much part of my teenage years, but it's also very much part of my life now - fuck, this is so hard! 'The Man with the Child in his Eyes', 'L'Amour Looks Something Like You', 'Them Heavy People' - all of them, 'Moving'... often it's the way the songs start, as much as anything. It's a bit like Blue; as soon as they start, you know something amazing's coming, and then her voice kicks in and it's just like heaven. Ah, it's just heavenly!"

"I was only nine years old in 1976 so I wasn't down the front at the 100 Club, I was still watching Doctor Who. Like everything in those days it probably filtered through slowly to Haywards Heath Market. It was the first record I bought. It was shockingly brilliant, and is one of those records that if you played it in 200 years time it would still sound like that. I think that they perfectly defined their own genre. They were the ultimate punk band. The other so-called punk bands to me sound like a parody of the Sex Pistols. It's a lot to do with John Lydon, he's a huge hero of mine. I was going to have a PiL record in here but I thought you can't have two records by the same person. I saw PiL play recently, and it's the first time I've ever done this, but I went to John Lydon's dressing room door to thank him for everything, but he was asleep. To have created the Sex Pistols was an amazing thing in itself, and then to go and create a new band that was just as groundbreaking in such a different way was unbelievable. John Lennon didn't do that. Jim Morrison didn't do that."