"I was at NYU film school when I first saw If…. The second time was the very next day, when I brought friends and classmates to share this extraordinary movie experience. I have always harbored fantasies of blowing up my high school, but until If…. I never realized that I was not the only one. Obviously If…. was a huge influence on Rock ’n’ Roll High School. In the mid-1980s, I wrote an article about high school movies for American Film magazine in which I opined that If…. was the greatest of them all. A month later, I received a lovely letter from Lindsay Anderson, my hero (I also love O Lucky Man!). We corresponded for several years, finally meeting at the Telluride Film Festival. He called me “a movie brat typical of my generation” for preferring The Searchers to She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. (I treasure his criticism.) Wrapped in a scarf, Malcolm McDowell is as riveting and charismatic as ever in his screen debut. I showed the movie to my teenage daughters, who only know Malcolm as Linderman on Heroes, and it impressed a whole new generation of rebellious teens. If….’s DVD extras, especially “O Lucky Malcolm,” really capture the spirit of the man and the movie."

"Raw Power for me is the greatest rock & roll record of all time. I wish Bruce Dickinson [executive producer of controversial 1997 remix attempt] had never got his paws on it. I loved the original mixes, because that’s how it should sound – the guitars are miles too loud for a normal record you’d think, but just the way the guitars come in it’s perfect. I was watching this thing on telly about Vikings disembowelling people and it’s almost like that. The guitars have angles. People go on about Exile On Main Street, which is a blues record with no tunes, but Raw Power is unbelievable. I bought it just for the cover and the titles on it. ‘Search and Destroy’, ‘Gimme Danger’ - it was right up my strasse. I was 13 or 14. I loved Iggy when I was younger, still do. I can do without all the more Motörhead stuff – he’s lost some of the finesse now. But what a song ‘Gimme Danger’ is – none of the songs hang about. Every second is important. His voice influenced the way I sang a lot. Whenever we played America Iggy would turn up, and we got on fairly good speaking terms. We were playing in New York. It was like a football changing room backstage. I was having a slash – probably in the shower, and I heard someone. I walked out – obviously not with my knob out – and it was Iggy with a tight leather jacket and blue suede shoes. He looked fantastic, and I said, ""what are you doing here?” And he said, “I always come and see your shows.”"

"So it's spring, early summer in 1977. I'm a teenager that's started school. I read a book about a punk. I know something's happening. I heard 'God Save The Queen'. I started buying records like The Stranglers' 'Peaches' and The Clash's first album. I remember looking at the cover of the latter at a record store at the bottom of my street called Soundtrack Records. I remember looking at the three guys on the cover with brutally shorn hair, tight drainpipes and wearing shirts with Paul Simonon having a Union Jack stitched on over the pocket. There was also a photo of the Notting Hill riots with the police fighting the Rasta youth. Earlier that year I watched a documentary with my father about the Notting Hill riots at the carnival. I found it really inspirational because I just love seeing the youth rise up and take on the cops. It was a pre-punk moment of seditious confrontation that I found totally inspiring. Just seeing people saying ""fuck you"" to the system is always inspiring to me. In terms of the Clash album itself, the song titles even sound great, such as 'I'm So Bored With The U.S.A.', 'White Riot', 'London's Burning' – I was like, ""Fuck!"" before I'd even heard the record! It totally blew my mind and I ended up buying the record. For a long time I'd stood outside the record store and looked at the sleeve! This album was basically everything I was waiting for. It was my rock & roll. Previous to that, I'd heard rock songs on commercial top-40 radio stations, such as Deep Purple, The Who and Rolling Stones, but it felt like a different generation's music. So with The Clash, I finally found my thing. The songwriting on the Clash album is amazing. 'Remote Control' lyrically was about big business and not liking the things you do. You got no money, you got no power, they think you're useless and that's exactly how you feel. I thought, ""Fucking hell"" when I heard it back. You still felt as a kid scared of going into the adult world when you left school. The song wasn't rock bravado or being macho but about being a young person going out into the world for the first time feeling powerless, which was empowering because when you relate to something, you feel stronger. 'Hate & War' was another song that took the hippie ideal of love and peace and turned it on its head by saying: ""There ain't no love and peace, this is the '70s, it's fucking hate and war here."" Punk rock was my portal and pathway to being a creative person. And the first Clash album was everything to set me on my way. Even now, I feel quite emotional talking about this. It's the most emotional record the Clash made because there's something really pure about it. I also think there's a humanism that the Clash have that the Pistols didn't, as the latter were just pure rage. For those reasons, this record is my life."

"This is a bit of a change in mood from the last song! For a long time Rod was a hero and an icon to me. “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” is just such a confident song and I remember listening to it a lot as I was starting to perform. I think all artists have a different persona they go into, or a switch they hit when they walk on stage, I would listen to this as a warmup song to get to that place before I performed. “I was lucky enough to re-record the song with Rod Stewart about a year ago - one of those moments when it really came full circle for me. My A&R told me they were planning to do a Rod Stewart tribute album with a bunch of different artists. She first presented a different song and I said “that would be amazing! But I’m definitely doing “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy”, right?” I think I even kicked out somebody else who was in line to do it! We recorded it, produced it and then performed it together at the VMAs. “Now we have this cool relationship where I see him when I’m in Vegas and I’m going to try to see one of his shows. Rod Stewart is my rock ‘n’ roll dad! It’s one of those rare experiences when you can say ‘it’s nice to meet your heroes.’"

"I was going to go for ‘Call On Me’ from Safe As Milk but it has to be ‘Sure 'Nuff 'n Yes I Do’, which is probably my favourite ever Beefheart song. If I do any DJ’ing or I’m doing a party I open the set with this song. There’s just something about it, the groove on it was something I found really inspiring, again I guess it’s rooted in Rock and Roll, but it’s the way the beat is performed where it really helps the song to motor along. “I first heard this song way back. We used to listen to Frank Zappa a lot and Hot Rats was my favourite record for a while. I know Zappa divides a lot of people, but I think sometimes it’s misunderstood. People see it as this really annoying, muso stuff, which I definitely think it was later on at times, but I’ve always been intrigued by the rawness of early Zappa, how he used Beefheart and how he collaborated with him was always really interesting. I always look at it as really raw, they were all really good at their instruments and really good players but not musos at all. I thought it was raw, exciting and on the edge, but then the late ‘70s came along!” “What I love about Captain Beefheart and this track is the off-kilter rhythms, the instrumentation, the surreal, strange lyrics and the directness of it with its economic structures. This track is insane and sometimes he gets really abstract, which is cool in a different way, it’s kind of like all of it to be honest for different reasons, but ‘Sure 'Nuff 'n Yes I Do’ is like a party track, it’s just dirty and wonderful."

"I don't want to sound like a broken fucking record but I've gotta go Simple Minds and Sons And Fascination. I've always picked Empires And Dance, but I keep switching to Sons And Fascination. If I remember rightly it was produced by Steve Hillage, so you could see the direction they were going in: he'd been and gone and was a real mainstay of the 70s prog scene, and it just shows the ambition of this band at that point in time. They'd been Johnny & The Self-Abusers, the quintessential proto-punk band, and then they'd done their first album which is kind of still punk-ish or punk-inspired. And then you realise there's a sea change, where they realise it's not the language they wanna speak. Sons And Fascinations comes after Empires And Dance, and working with Steve Hillage was symbolic of them wanting to explore something in themselves. I think if a posh lad reinvents himself and explores avenues he gets a plaudit for it, but rock & roll history is littered with lots of working class lads that have really reinvented the wheel and reinvented themselves and they've searched for things which should have been out of their reach. And they never get the credit for it. Simple Minds are another band that happened to. This album is full of pure, post-abstract expressionism. 'In Trance As Mission', 'Sweat In Bullet', '70 Cities As Love Brings The Fall', 'Boys From Brazil, 'Love Song'. 'Love Song!' Amongst all that! A fucking amazing white Scottish pop-dance record with an industrial backbone. Not many people achieve that kind of mash-up or fusion in their lives. They were concurrently making Sister Feelings Call at the same time. Another band who got pilloried for being pretentious. But they were working class boys who were just reaching for pretension and saying, "No, we will not be fucking defined by you. This is what we're doing. Go fuck yourselves." I've been listening to Sons And Fascination again, and it's just a crowning, towering achievement for a bunch of working class boys from Glasgow, because they weren't allowed to do it; they weren't supposed to do it. People told them to fuck off and they said, "No, we're gonna do it, and we're gonna do it better than anybody else."