"When I was about thirteen an older friend of mine made me a tape of DC hardcore. Making tapes is a lost art and I still do it, but you can get USB’s now that look like tapes. He made me a tape because I only knew Minor Threat and they were like a gateway drug for me. “This was the first song on there, it’s from the split record Void did on Dischord Records with The Faith in 1983. It’s funny, when Freddie was talking about what he liked and didn’t like, when you’re that age you’re constantly navigating through the sea of songs you actually really connect with and the ones you think you should like, because they make sense with the identity you’re trying to cultivate for yourself and I was floored by ‘Who Are You?’ “It’s everything that’s great about Punk Rock and everything that’s great about music when you’re a kid, that rage and that anger and also feeling completely misunderstood by everyone in your house, your family, your school or your hometown. I read that Kurt Cobain put this in his top 50 songs of all time and of course that makes sense, it’s a song about being misunderstood and that’s what Nirvana came to represent for another generation. “It’s Punk Rock at its best and like The Stooges song for Freddie, this really taught me that it’s not what you play it’s how you play it, as long as you’re being authentic, and Punk Rock is just authentic rock isn’t it? I was in a punk band and my first shows were in Southampton above a pub for this DIY collective called ‘STE’ - which stood for ‘Southampton, Totton and Eastleigh punk collective.’ Students got in for a quid and under 16’s got in free. It was great, there weren’t many women, but other than that it was a great way to ply your trade. “I’ll play it to you and when you hear the opening you’ll see what I mean. It’s this intro, this riff, it still excites me now, it’s just so brutal and the song’s a minute long. It’s so direct and to me it’s weirdly poppy as well, maybe I’m alone in thinking that, but it was a song that was really easy to connect with. It’s filled with rage and it’s one of those songs that you want to turn up so your parents can hear who you are and see where you are in your life."

"I love this movie and its revisionist style and its radical politics, but most importantly there is no more punk-rock move in cinema history than having the opening credits be the checks that you’re writing to the cast and crew. Godard—the rich-kid film nerd to end all rich-kid film nerds—gets the machinations of the motion picture “industry” better than any of us. Contempt is masterful, Weekend is a lark, Tout va bien burns everything to the ground."

"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 first heard The Human League at a party, 'Being Boiled'. It was miles apart from punk music, punk is rehashed rock & roll really, but Travelogue wasn't repeating anything, it was just out there on its own. The first two Human League albums were so different from anything I'd ever heard in my life. That's when I really realised how interesting and powerful synthesisers could be. I really liked Phil Oakey's voice and I think on tracks like 'Dreams Of Leaving' it's really an emotional song, and the way that they used the keyboards to bring that emotion out is amazing. I really like the lyrics on that song, and the out-of-this-world sounds. I got the opportunity to work with Martin Ware years ago, and most of the time that we were recording was me asking questions, "How did you get that sound?""

"Discharge do write short pop songs. They're like punk rock haiku. I love Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing and still listen to it regularly. To me it's not only a great punk rock record it's also a very psychedelic record, which may not seem normal to most people. Of all the records I ever listened to while tripping on acid, this is the one that sounded the best. You'd think with the lyrics and the cover that it would be a scary proposition. It was more like getting wrapped up in the sound. The guitars sounded like they were in a hall of mirrors, there are so many layers bouncing back and forth. You can almost kind of view the whole record as one long song, or a piece with these little movements. I've obviously thought about it way too much while tripping on acid! From that era - the early 80s - I was really into Discharge, Crass, Zounds, some of the other Crass bands, but a lot of the other stuff like Peter And The Test Tube Babies seemed really dumb to me and weak. I didn't get into Oi! bands. They'd tend to have these dumb singalong choruses and chanting and the guitar parts always seemed to be like ""the box"" - a four-fret pattern. Of course I loved a lot of the earlier UK punk rock bands. That's a problem with these lists where you have to think of thirteen albums. I can't fit The Damned in there, I can't fit Pere Ubu. I could but I'd have to take something out and all these records are equally important to me. It's like choosing between children or favourite grandparents!"

"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."

"In my book this isn't a punk record - it's a fantastic rock album. I mean, it's produced by Chris Thomas for goodness sake. Cookie (Paul Cook) is a fantastic drummer: I know him because he plays in Phil Collen's other band, The Manraze Then you have Steve Jones - fucking amazing guitarist. Matlock had gone by this point, I think he was on 'Anarchy…' and Sid was on 'Bodies' but apart from that Jones did all of the guitar and all of the bass parts as well. And he probably did more overdubs on that than we did on bloody Pyromania - it took nine months to record. It's a real album: it represents punk, but in many ways it doesn't. The Pistols record is as planned out as a Genesis album. And that's why it works: it's fucking brilliant. Nobody snarls like Rotten: his 'we mean it, man' on 'God Save the Queen', it puts the hairs on my arm up to this day."

"When I went on my first non parent holiday to Skegness with my mates, this was the soundtrack. We were in a nightclub and 'Go Buddy Go' came on and we were bouncing off the walls. I mean, the Stranglers sounded like the Doors; they were about as punk rock as Genesis, they jumped on the bandwagon. I saw pictures of them from six months before and they were wearing flares, for gods sake! But they were a great band, it didn't matter. They outlived punk. They were making outrageously different music - sometimes limitations create great music. 'Down In The Sewer' - it was great, the bass sound was insane. It did the same thing to my heart as Ian Drury 'New Boots and Panties'; it was just bloody brilliant. I loved it all. That Stranglers record is dark and exciting and weird. A lot of my choices here are a bit off kilter, actually. Indie movies as opposed to Hollywood blockbusters."