"Queen Of Denmark and the Irrepressibles album were kind of jointly on my CD player in the car and I played them both endlessly. I love John's voice and I absolutely love Jamie [McDermott, Irrepressibles founder]'s voice as well - they're completely different voices but both extremely natural. Some people I play The Irrepressibles to, they thought it sounded like Antony, but I didn't get that. Whereas John has a more masculine appeal and nowness that has been embraced by the gay community of bears and beards. His stories are of woe tinged with a sardonic sense of humour, which is one of the most important things about his songwriting, whereas Jamie has an extravagant vision - extravagance on a shoestring, I don't know how he does it - but lovely orchestral instrumentation and absolutely beautiful vocals. I went to see the Mirror Mirror show at the Barbican and it was amazing and it should've been written about and applauded by the likes of The Guardian and that, but for some reason Jamie still continues to do lovely work but it just doesn't get the press and the support from the music industry that John has had. John is great and deserving of it - this album's brilliant, as is Pale Green Ghosts, but I would especially like people to listen to that Irrepressibles album, because he's a great artist and a hidden gem amongst the whole 21st century queer landscape."

"I'd heard of Andy Warhol, but I'd never heard The Velvet Underground until David Bowie talked about them in interviews in the NME, and of course Transformer. I'd rather talk about Transformer than the banana album actually, because Transformer sums up the era. I do believe that Mick Ronson was very instrumental - like a classically trained musician as well as a gorgeous rock god lead guitarist. His arrangement abilities for both Ziggy Stardust and Transformer have not been fully recognised in the history of pop music. I don't think David would've broke through without that. I remember dancing to 'Vicious' in a nightclub called Masquerade in Liverpool - a really eccentric gay bar full of diesel dykes, prostitutes and older gay men with dyed black hair and toupees. It was a strange netherworld hidden up a back alley that embraced a bunch of freaks of my generation like Pete Burns and me, Jane Casey, who wore too much make-up. That was the thing about a gay club, you were safe almost in there. A strange refuge. I suppose in a way, punk kind of helped that. Absolutely. One minute you were queer on the street, the next minute you were a punk. It normalised that sort of behaviour really, you know; ""Oh, they're just punks"", and it was a diversion away from sexuality. Punk was strangely non-sexual. Even the main protagonist John Lydon had something of a 'neither here nor there' about him."