"Oasis definitely did change my life when I first heard them! [Bell later played bass and rhythm guitar in Oasis, 1999-2009.] They were like a breath of fresh air. To put it into context, Ride were working on the third album, Carnival Of Light, and we were taking a bit of a break. We were starting to get a bit frayed at the edges and we were starting to pull in different directions musically, too. “We were really shooting for a kind of West Coast Byrdsy California sound mixed with a little bit of Led Zeppelin and a little bit of classic rock. I think we were also subconsciously trying to make a cleaner record, because we’d stopped getting played on the radio… but then along comes Oasis sounding like the Jesus And Mary Chain meets the Sex Pistols and just completely blew everything out of the water! “As we’re talking about guitars, I should just say that I think Noel’s really underrated as a lead guitar player. His playing is like a John Squire-y thing, but there’s a lot more muscle behind it. He kind of trademarked his own style, which has become something that everyone uses now – that massively overdriven sound with quite a lot of delay on it. [His playing] just sounded epic."

"This is a record that has been with me so long because of the hippy environment that I grew up in. When I was 11 or 12, I remember the excitement of hearing this record for the first time. There are a couple of duds on there, and that threw me off a bit. But there are so many amazing songs that show the softer side of Jimi Hendrix - incredible songwriting and more mellow stuff, and these choruses that just explode in a really dramatic way. It also triggers a funny memory for me when I think about this record… My first girlfriend - in grade seven, when I was 12 or 13 - she was the daughter of one of the teachers at the school. She was really into Hendrix and was part of the reason why I got into him. But around the time I got hold of this record, she dropped acid in gym class. She was the first person I knew to drop acid. And then her mum came up to her when she was trying to open her locker - she was the teacher - and started talking to her. I know some people find 'Little Wing' a bit too saccharine, but all those Hendrix ballads make me so nostalgic for that time and all the people that I knew and where I grew up."

"Hair is a really cool musical. It's about the late 60s’ hippie movement in America - tribal love, peace 'n' love 'n' rock 'n' roll, people tripping on LSD and expanding their consciousness, all of these concepts that came about in the late 60s’. It's one of my favourite periods in music and in the arts, it was sort of our American renaissance right around then and lot of incredible music came from that time. “I'm an Aquarius; that's my zodiac sign. I think the song is talking about the Age of Aquarius, which was starting around that time, which was said to be a time of enlightenment. It's such a cool song, it has a great melody and I've always loved it. “I ended up doing a production of Hair out in Germany when I was about 22. Personally, it was such an eye opener, I was pretty green when I went out there, but not so green when I left. I was doing a lot of things for the first time and experiencing a lot of things for the first time. “It was a bit of an awakening for me - artistically and personally - with fashion and with sexuality and with all these different things. It was a big transformative moment for me and this song always reminds me of that time.”"