"The Cure were just coolest band. They somehow completely hit the nail on the head, and they’re still relevant. They still manage to not put a bad taste in your mouth. They were never pandering to their fans too much. The greyness, the starkness, the boringness of Faith, the minimal-ness, the pathetic emptiness, the bleakness is perfect. They’re perfectly smudged images Robert Smith creates and you can’t make anything out. This record came before they were properly The Cure; at this point they were still a pop band. They were like a pop group; a three-piece that were seen as not really having an image. They were a bit too dapper, and not really punk enough. And then the next record and the record after that were bad. He was basically in the process of killing off his band. Those were very unpopular decisions he was making when he slowed it down and made it very minimal for the second record, which seemed pointless to the critical mass. It was seen as a mistake. And his hair wasn't even grown out at this point. This is a time in Robert Smith’s life before he had decided to come out as a parody of his former self. He was a serious guy but he decided to come out as a mockery. It’s all a caricature of the serious brooding twenty-year-old that was making bad decisions and sinking his band into the ground. After this came ‘The Lovecats’, and that was the worst thing he could possibly do. So my point is what you’re seeing is the evolution of a person. When you look back at that early stuff there is nothing funny about it, it’s completely sincere."

"I’d just say Greatest Hits, if we’re making a list of albums to turn people on, a greatest hits will do fine. Some of that music I listened to when I was nine to thirteen did not stand the test of time, but Sly and the Family Stone is kind of ridiculous in how good it is. Songs, musicianship, just fucking weirdness, sound and ‘how the fuck’; again - as I was saying about 1999 – you’re just scratching your head, like, ""how did this happen?"" If you play in a band and you’re young and you haven’t listened to Sly and the Family Stone, then your band is gonna fucking suck [laughs]. Probably not a true statement, but to me it is. I grew up in the seventies so I’d hear these stories, like he didn’t turn up to his gig, he was four hours late to the gig... I mean they were huge but it was just willy nilly live. I would say the influences on my bass playing was a really wide thing, I didn’t really decide I was going to be a bass player until I was 19, 20. I was playing drums, I was playing guitar, I was playing bass and when I finally took that big step and said, ""okay, I’m going to be a bass player"" and I kind of melded a load of things together. The band Magazine, that bass sound with the chorus on the bass... it took me some years to work out that effect, 'cos I didn’t know much about effects in the eighties, but the sound you hear with Guns is really derived from listening to that first Magazine record, combined with first Sly and the Family Stone and Prince, with a real punk rock ethic underlining the whole thing."

"It's an album that had a massive effect on me when I was young. I remember on Steve Lamacq's Roundtable, there was a track from Journal For Plague Lovers which a member of Wire completely slagged off. So this shows how much I actually like this album, because he obviously hated us and thought were just plod-rocking, rock-dinosaur philistines. But despite that I'm still going to quote this as a really influential album for me. A lot of people pick Pink Flag and Chairs Missing as their favourite records, but for me this is the apex of their achievement: they're still fusing really blunt-edge experimental rock with really abstract notions and wild ideologues and monologues of different sorts. There's a song on there called 'The 15th' which is just an amazing song; there's another song called 'The Other Window', which has a direct lineage from some of the Velvet Underground narrated songs like 'The Gift', and it's about this guy travelling on a train and outside there's an animal dying in a barbed-wire fence. There's another song called 'Two People In A Room' which is just fucking brutal. A lot of people like Wire then they're bleak or when people couldn't get a handle on what they were saying, but I think on this you can pin down the emotion to the record, pin down the marriage of experimental edge with rock. For me, it's one of the great lost post-punk records. It's an amazing record that never really gets written about. It was produced by Mike Thorne who never did as good a record again. And I just love the cover: it's got a very… almost Mondrian kind of vibe to it. It's really strange and quite unsettling. I just love the record."

"What a great songwriter and lyricist Shane MacGowan is. It’s funny as last night I was going through some of these again to listen to them, as they’re maybe records I hadn’t listened to for a while. Rum Sodomy & The Lash is one I hadn’t played for a while, but I knew it was one I’d played to death at different points in my life, so I thought “I’ll go back and listen to that again, I wonder if it does hold up”. There are other records that I thought would make the list that didn’t make it, that I still thought were good and I can appreciate why I loved them when I was 16, like Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables, which I still think is a great record, but there’s something that makes Shane MacGowan one of the greats of the century, like 'The Old Main Drag' – you don’t know when it’s written, like 1912 or 1982, you know? Very few people can write songs like that. Music that is specifically about place and characters yet it seems timeless. To pull that off is astonishing. Also they saved folk music from the twats; unfortunately they seem to have reclaimed it in recent years. Suddenly folk music became violent and soaked in whiskey again as it should be! In a way that the Irish community in London are neither Irish nor London, they’re just their own thing; The Pogues were neither punk nor folk. Shane McGowan’s delivery – he can take a song like Ewan McColl’s 'Dirty Old Town' or 'A Pair Of Brown Eyes' or 'The Band Played Waltzing Matilda' and give them a poignancy or life or meaning, or a dirt and raw-bloodied abrasiveness which most performers could never bring to a place like that."

"Say what you will, nobody is trying to show off here, it's just solid songwriting. The great thing about almost every song on that record is that you can pick up an acoustic guitar and just play it and sing along. Joe [Elliott] singing the melody, he doesn't sing the highest and his voice doesn't rip up the most, it just sticks to the melody. It's great rock sensibility. The melodies aren't too bluesy, it's just a really solid record, and ten million other people must have thought so too because they bought it. But the interesting thing for me about that record is how honest it sounds, yet how unlike rock bands it was recorded. We took Def Leppard out with us and they told us the story of how their producer Mutt Lange would get them in the studio and the record was totally fabrication, by that I mean they would put down the drum track, then the computers would move the drum track so it really felt in time. Then he would ask Phil or someone to play one note - so instead of chords they'd be doing one note at a time. Then the chords would come from different tracks so you could control it, one note at a time. That record took two years. I've never heard of anybody doing that before or since. You can argue that it makes it sound different or better, but then there are great punk bands that go and bang things out in a day. There are no rules! Led Zeppelin I was recorded in 18 hours. The Beatles' first two records were done in 24 hours. But you can't argue with Mutt Lange's success."

"Unfortunately I never saw them, but Kilburn & The High Roads [Ian Dury’s first band] used to play near where we were hanging around as kids. I was a couple of years younger than the rest of the band, who went to see them at the Tally-Ho. They were a huge phenomenon round our way. And they made a great album called Handsome, but a lot of the stuff Ian Dury was working towards on that album really came to fruition on New Boots And Panties. It was slightly infused by the whole punk thing, it had that wild energy, but it still had that vaudevillian faded grandeur of the music hall. Again, it’s about comedy and terror: “arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks” is a pretty fun thing to hear when you’re a teenager, coming out of the speakers! He was pretty acerbic in person. I remember I was with Clive Langer once, our producer, and he said “Ian, I love your work” and Ian said “So fucking what?” That was about the strength of it, with Ian. We got to know him better near the end. He played one of our Madstock gigs, and we recorded a track with him just before he died, called ‘Drip-Fed Fred’, which is rather good. I think he always saw us as slightly usurping him, which is kind of true. He could be very acidic. When he was working in our studio, I remember the police were called a couple of times. But an amazing artist and fantastic lyricist, and of course you listen to some of those songs now, ‘Clever Trevor’, ‘Billericay Dickie’, ‘Plaistow Patricia’ and all that, and they haven’t dated at all."