"1977. I'm a sixteen-year-old kid and glam rock has died. Disco has come in but this saved my life. Lennon once said to Bowie that glam rock was just 'rock & roll with lipstck' and if that's the case then punk was glam without the musicianship. It certainly wasn't disco and it sure as fuck wasn't overblown proggy stuff. They blew Yes and Genesis and all that stuff out of the water. They took us back to the three minute pop song. Punk songs were short and sweet. That first Clash record was amazing. There was a huge amount of melody on that record that nobody ever takes any notice of. Mick Jones was a huge Mott the Hoople fan - he was a member of the Sea Divers [the Mott fan club] and used to follow them around the country. 'Janie Jones' is brilliant; their version of 'I Fought The Law' is just outstanding, the best ever recorded. They might have written better songs on London Calling but, as an album, this was a breath of fresh air amongst the 70s stuff. I was still playing Diamond Dogs and Ziggy but this was like a newer version. When punk started kicking off it was brilliant, because they all came to Sheffield - more so than the glam bands. I could actually go and see them. I saw the Clash, the Ramones, Slaughter and the Dogs, Eddie and the Hotrods, Dr Feelgood - that whole intersection with pub rock. It was a lifesaver."

"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."

"If you like Nirvana, you should know about her. If you're interested in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, you should know about her. If you want to know about female singers generally, she's the secret ingredient. If you go back and listen to any of her music, like her bands Bikini Kill or Le Tigre, this is a woman who's smart and political but also funny and clever. She's the Tina Fey of punk rock."

"Even though his music isn’t a huge influence on Vampire Weekend, I’d say Expensive Shit was probably the first African record I listened to a lot. In my early teens, I was into punk rock, and looking at the album cover, it fit in with that aesthetic. I learned the backstory about Fela getting busted for drugs. It was my introduction not only to the music, but also to the political situation."

"I was about 14, 15 when I first heard this. There was a period just before punk when I was at grammar school. Grammar school being grammar school they tended to like these white rock bands. That was where I got introduced to bands like Yes, Zeppelin, Tangerine Dream, that I also liked. For me, they are my favourite American rock band. Their synergy, the way they play together, and again the engineering of that album, I don't think was ever surpassed. It's got everything. I suppose the Beach Boys might be contenders, but the Doors are my favourites."

"I wasn’t really a punk. I was about 16 when that album came out. But I was living above Maples, a carpet shop near Tottenham Court Road, and it was right by Capital Radio, and I remember suddenly these 14-foot letters appeared in spraypaint on Capital‘s windows, ‘THE CLASH’! And there was a thing in Melody Maker, where I heard about this club called The Roxy at Covent Garden, so I went down there. Me and my friends already looked a bit skinhead-y, suedehead-y, and I had this mohair suit, but the connection was that the punks had straight trousers in this world of flares and Kevin Keegan hairdos. Nobody was wearing Vivienne Westwood clothing: there was a guy in a dinner jacket painted pink, and someone else in a boiler suit they’d made themselves, and it was really DIY. The tribalism between mods and skinheads and punks hadn’t really started at that time, and it hadn‘t fractured into a million pieces yet. In 1977, if you had short hair, and you were prepared to have someone call you a fucking cunt in your ear for it, you were in. I saw a band called Eater at the Roxy, whose average age I later found out was 14. And I first heard The Clash’s ‘1977’ and ‘White Riot’ on record there. I felt like I was at the advent of something new. I liked punk, and I liked the attitude, but by 1978 we had our own thing going. But I always had a soft spot for The Clash, because they had the reggae thing, like us, and there was a bit of soul in their music, for want of a better word. Joe Strummer definitely had a bit of soul in his voice. Every fucking track on that album’s brilliant, but my favourite’s ‘London’s Burning’. And they were fucking brilliant live. And we [2 Tone bands] wouldn’t have had anywhere to play if it wasn’t for punk. You had pub rock informing punk, and punk informing us, and The Specials were a direct amalgam of punk and ska, and we realised that the faster we played, the more likely we could get the crowd jumping up and down, which was a legacy of punk. All these different movements, fracturing then coming back together. You’d need 60,000 sociologists to untangle those couple of years."

"This song has this kind of rocksteady beat over a little bit of a punk rock thing, but I could relate to it because it still sounded like folk music. It wasn’t over the top like the Sex Pistols, it was music from the street and for the people and it had a heartbeat. Joe was explaining the situation in the song much like Bob too, and something in my head just clicked where I was like, ‘This is the same.’ That sent me even further on my musical course. “When I first heard Joe and Mick [Jones, lead guitarist in The Clash] get together and play those beats with the simple guitar stabs, I knew that all I cared about was lyrics. I didn’t care about the music or playing technical. Of course, I was only 13 years old and now I care much more about that, but at this point I just wanted to communicate my message and The Clash showed me the way. After that I got even deeper into storytelling punk rock music."