"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."

"I think I was on MySpace, that's how long ago it was, and I was looking for Omar Souleyman. I ended up finding Ali Hussan Kuban by mistake. I found this track called 'Habibi', and it blew my mind. The first bit of drums when it comes in, it's almost like drum & bass, but it's not but it's not folkloric African either, it feels like rock & roll. It's so direct, and it's speaking our language, but it's from a completely different culture, and I just love that. And when you hear his voice… His voice is killer - it sounds like Joe Strummer. His voice just feels so punk, especially later on when they start dubbing it and putting all this delay on it. It was that one song that made me start Melt Yourself Down. I was playing it at a party and people were going mad. By that point I'd been obsessed with this song for months, I was listening to it over and over again. Everyone I played it to was like: ""Oh my god, what the fuck is that?!"". I thought: I want to make a cover of this song, I want to start a band. Because I didn't have a band at the time. Acoustic Ladyland was over. I said: I think I'm going to form a band just to do that one song. The next day when I was coming down from my birthday party evening, I just thought, let's do that - brilliant idea. I phoned everybody and said: ""let's do it!"". I organised a rehearsal and then the next day I came to and thought: 'oh shit, I think a formed a band yesterday'. And then I thought, 'well OK, let's just start writing'. I went upstairs and wrote 'Fix My Life', and then it all came together really quickly."

"It was a real wake-up call. Hip hop until 1984, 85 was fun but for the most part it was party music. Living outside New York we'd listen to WBLS and Kiss FM where they played a lot of hip hop and me and my friends liked it, but it was very lighthearted. The Fatboys are the perfect example, or the Treacherous Three, where they have disco basslines and this fun vocal. Then almost out of nowhere Public Enemy happened. Everything about it was different. The lyrics were different, Chuck D's vocal approach was different, the subject matter and the production, the Bomb Squad. I remember hearing it for the first time and thinking how did they do this, because they've basically made punk rock hip hop, the sounds they were using, the way they were distorting basslines, it was a lot of the same ways industrial records were being made but they were making hip hop. It was so revolutionary. You can refer to musical culture in New York as before and after Public Enemy, it changed the city. New York was so dangerous then, it had the highest murder count, people were getting stabbed and shot and the crack epidemic was decimating communities and people were dying of AIDS. You'd go out to nightclubs in the late 80s and you'd hear these apocalyptic Public Enemy songs that perfectly described the city that you lived in, but they were oddly celebratory and you could dance to them. For better or worse one of the reasons I've left New York is because the city I grew up with is still there, but it's become a much meaner, safer version of its former self. I still love New York, but it's become primarily the domain of hedge fund managers and wealthy tourists, so I don't know how many more Suicides and Silver Apples and Public Enemys and Eric B & Rakims are going to come out New York City."

"The poster for Vagabond is an image of a woman with strange, defiant eyes and hair like that of an unkempt animal. In 1985, I was living in New York and going to the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. I had a pretty wild roommate named Lizzie who was really into punk rock. She would party all night and sleep all day. This poster was over her bed. You get the picture. She took me to see Vagabond. I still haven’t recovered. This film introduced me to the director Agnès Varda. Varda has a film language all her own, and anyone who wants to direct will learn story and camera technique by watching Vagabond. You’ll have a field day wondering how she constructed the seamless tracking shots. I had the opportunity to interview Varda, and she gave me the following insight with a glint in her eye: “I try to make something look simple.” Vagabond is a seemingly simple story that gets more complex as you watch it. It begins almost like Sunset Blvd. In the French countryside, the dead body of a young woman is discovered. She’s frozen as if she’s been there for days, and we don’t know anything about her. There is voice-over by Varda herself, not the victim. Who is this woman? How did she get here? Varda will explain for us. The movie plays with time, a theme in Varda’s work that she also explores in Cléo from 5 to 7. With tracking shots moving right to left, Varda goes back in time to reconstruct the events that led to this young woman freezing to death in a ditch. Sandrine Bonnaire’s performance is very raw, almost self-destructive, but very effective. There’s a “There but for the grace of God go I” feeling as you watch her. Every act of rebellion, every bottle of booze, every man she has sex with, brings her closer and closer to her demise. Even when someone is genuinely kind to her, you are wondering when the next act of betrayal will come. The world is a tough place, and sometimes the only grace is the dignity of death. Frozen and still."

"Continuing the otherworldly theme, as we’re looking chronologically at our lives and youth, this is the next song that hit me as a young person, at the age of seven or eight. The reason it hit me so hard, so young, was because it was one of the first songs that I understood was about death. “I grew up in the Catskill Mountains and Grasshopper grew up in Lake Erie, so we were well away from New York, punk rock or anything that was happening in the ‘70s, we were out in the hinterland. All that I could listen to was AM radio and ‘Seasons in the Sun’ was a massive hit, but lyrically its dealing with death, ‘Goodbye to you my trusted friend.’ He’s dying and I’m a young kid thinking ‘Why’s this guy dying on the radio? What’s he dying from?’ It was so much more than the syrupy, ‘I’ve got love in my tummy’ stuff that had come out of the ‘60s. “And this mystery, I was old enough to know what dying meant, but too young to understand that you could sing about it. Yet here was Terry Jacks singing this very sad, almost suicidal song and it hit me like a ton of bricks. now I started not only having to process music that I was deeply in love with, but also processing lyrics at seven or eight. The idea of the mystery within the song, that there were not only unanswered questions, but the biggest question, death. That’s what rang my bell, it was existentialism in a three-and-a-half-minute pop song. “I didn’t have all the tools to process it artistically at my young age but I knew it was deep, it was important and it was really, really sad. It was almost like a traumatic moment in early childhood that you didn’t experience directly, but indirectly it shook your bones, like the death of a relative you’ve barely met. You can tell everyone around you is ringing like a brass bell from it and that was something I got from that song."