"Even just thinking about this song, I can feel the beginning of tears in the backs of my eyes. It's such an astonishing piece of lyric writing. It's like that Linton Kwesi Johnson track - the narrator of the song, and their emotions, are so believable. Both songs are about letters, funnily enough. “The imagery is so gentle but it's still significant and it's recognisable of a different world; just the idea of a typing pool now is absurd - it's something that belongs to a different decade. And then the imagery of the paper and the ink drying and there's a confession, but we don't know what the truth is. She's talking about telling the truth in this letter she's written, but we don't know whether she's confessing to something she's done or to the way she truly feels. “Either way, it's definitely a story about the end. 99.999% of people who've loved in their lives will know how that feels, what it's like when love ends and this is one of those songs that just gently captures the hugeness of that kind of situation. It's sung and worded very softly, but what it's describing is incomprehensibly massive. It's communicated with that image of the page being wiped clean, while the landscape remains unchanged. Absolutely astonishing. “Trish Keenan’s death is a story of tragedy in itself, because she was so unique. I know you shouldn't try to relate the personal story of the performer to the piece of music, or the writing, or the play, but you can't help but do it in this case because so many Broadcast songs are in that vein. When you communicate emotion in a song the reason it works is because, as a listener, you recognise something you've experienced before, and so Trish's writing doesn't just remind you of loss - it reminds you of the loss of her.”"

"I didn't know much about Sly and I'd only heard the two hits that he'd had, which were 'Everyday People', which I loved because of that bass line which goes all the way through without changing once, and 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)', and I loved them but I didn't think that much of them. Then one evening in 1971 I was round the house of this bunch of London musos who I'd kind of fallen in with and they were all sort of jazz-influenced people. They used to smoke a lot of grass. I didn't, but the room was full of enough stuff to probably affect me. They were all talking about this album and how it set the scene for something totally new, and I was interested because they were the very serious people who were into Coltrane and Charlie Parker, yet this was a pop record. It's so sketchy, the whole thing, it hardly holds together. It's like little flicks of paint. Instead of an organised composition, it's just people throwing in these little touches and somehow it coheres. It's like the first time I saw a Jackson Pollock or something. Another interesting thing about this is I had just started experimenting with rhythm boxes, which were considered completely beyond the pale by most musicians. They had like six rhythms on: bossa nova, Latin, rock & roll... something like that, and they had these terrible sounds [mimics rhythm box] but I really liked them and I was starting to write things over them, and everyone was asking me, ""Well, you'll replace that, won't you?"" and I said, ""Actually, I don't think I will."" Then I heard this (first track, 'In Time'), where one is playing alongside Andy Newmark, one of the great drummers of all time. But there's nothing really holding it together except the rhythm box."

"Electric Ladyland actually would be a welcome album if it was a brand new band today. It still holds up. It was actually a pivotal record in the sense that you had a guitar player, perhaps the pre-eminent one of them all, who actually took chances in terms of songwriting. He also experimented with electronics, backing tapes and all that stuff. The reason that I know all of this is because the engineer and producer on that was a guy called Eddie Kramer who engineered some of the earlier Kiss records, and he would tell us stories and everything. A double album, it had lots of great guests on it like Dave Mason from Traffic and many others. 'Crosstown Traffic' is great, very unlike Jimi Hendrix. Noel Redding, the bass player actually auditioned as a guitar player and Hendrix told him, 'I'm actually looking for a bass player', so he had to switch over to bass right on the spot, which is why his bass playing, with a pick, is not the way that most bass players play. I was still in school when I heard it, I must have been 17 or so because I remember drawing the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the name and all that, on the cover of my notebook. In those days we used to buy albums sometimes just because of the album covers. There was an art to it, there were big hardcover books talking about the art and design of album covers and there were artists and companies like Hipgnosis and places like that which specialised in just creating album covers. For instance, on Love Gun we had a painter named Ken Kelly who painted the piece, and it was a lot of time and effort. It was an art, and sadly that's gone. Now the visuals are down to the size of a postage stamp, you don't get much. I didn't actually buy this one because of the cover. I'd bought Axis: Bold As Love because of the cover."

"For the rest of these songs we’re closer to now. My Father-in-law introduced me to this, he’s not a musician by trade but he grew up in the hippy era and was really into blues. He has all of these reference points, music that went totally over the head of my generation. The reference points from that period for my generation are a totally different set of people, Jimi Hendrix or music that even my Father-in-law didn’t know at the time, like the Jim Sullivan record that people are digging out as an undiscovered gem. “I would never have discovered Charlie Musselwhite but for my Father-in-law. He was excited that I was a musician and we could hang out and talk about records, sometimes it doesn’t work and his taste will veer in directions that I totally can’t get into, but he’s introduced me to some great music that I love, like Professor Longhair records. ""I heard this in 2009, after Veckatimest and it was really striking because it’s so straight-up and straightforward. It’s the most minimal 6/8 blues tune and it’s very simple, the drums, organ and guitar line don’t change, the harmonica does the melody and a simple solo and that’s it. There’s these beautiful little contained elements, all the sounds are super lush and it’s another kind of subtlety, the attention to tone is so specific. It’s really elegant and hip, but in a totally different realm, a blues perspective from a totally different era, it’s like what Beach House would have been if they were a blues band in 1962. “It’s not trying to do anything revolutionary, it’s just exactly what it is, great playing without trying to be great playing. It’s so personal and visceral and sometimes you really need that sort of music. It’s the simplicity and soulfulness, it’s so minimal and especially going into Shields we started talking about that more and more, having that sense of space"

"My first concert! I rode my bike to the city, because I lived in the suburbs and I tried to meet Angus Young outside the tour bus, asking the security guy, [imitates younger self] "Can I meet Angus Young?" "No, he's not here!" "Hey dude! What the fuck?! Don't talk to me like that, I bought a ticket!" Also, it was my first experience of how loud - it was the loudest shit I've ever heard! And in the suburbs, they were a dangerous band. It was like, "Oh fuck, the devil", it kind of made Kiss look tame, and it just powers. And when Angus Young solos, it's just magic. I saw them on that tour when Bon Scott had died; he'd just died and Brian Johnson had just taken over, and I was totally sceptical, and then it was like, "Oh, he's fucking good!" And actually, when Kim left the band, and we're going, "Aw shit, we're fucked", and we're talking about what we're going to do, and then we're like, "Fucking AC/DC replaced the fucking lead singer! We can do this! [sombrely] We shall overcome!" And we thought about replacing Kim with a dude, and then we went, "What?! They replaced Bon Scott with a guy that sounds exactly like Bon Scott! Let's not break the plate! We're not broken, we're not broken at all. Give me a fucking break." So I was totally adamant [laughs]! Song two ['Girls Got Rhythm'], it's like: "SEX!" It's about "SEX!" It's not like Foreigner, where it's obvious but it's fucking stupid - come on, you can do better than that! It's like, "I want to have sex with you, what's the problem?" I think it's the ultimate way to get attention: "Come on, we're not here to meet up, let's cut to the chase. I'm not going to waste your time, don't waste my time! Let's fuck, come on, I don't have time for this!" [laughs]"

"Maybe ten years later [after seeing Salò], I had written some shorts and I was talking with a friend who said, “Oh, have you seen this Austrian movie that has been banned in France for extreme violence?” That came out in VHS. And the German title was Angst. And the VHS was called Schizophrenia — the French VHS with French subtitles. And I tell you it was weird, it was like the beginning of some kind of new thing — that some movies could be banned for theatrical release but they could still come out on VHS. So I got the VHS. Nowadays there are maybe things that are banned out there, but you can find it with one click on the net. But this time, something that was banned could be found on VHS. I bought that VHS; that was quite hard to find. And I believe that I watched that movie 50 times because each time a friend said, “Let’s go see a movie,” I said, “Come to my house. I’ll show you Schizophrenia.” So one by one I was showing that movie to all my friends. And it’s got the most amazing camera work in the history of cinema. Not so many movies that really impress when it comes to the camera work. Maybe Brian DePalma’s movies… or 2001. Or, for example, lately, the images of Gravity. But the camera work of this movie is so real. It added to a very violent story of the guy coming out of jail and killing a whole family in order to go back to jail where he felt better, and it’s based on a true story. And it’s got a [unique] voiceover. But the mix of that cruelty, the voiceover and the camera put in positions that you’ve never seen before made me be obsessed with the movie. Now, since three or four months ago, it’s for sale [on DVD here in America]. So if anybody is interested you can go on Amazon.com and buy that movie called Angst."

"I had this back in the days when The Monkees were a TV show and they were everybody's favourite. Every Saturday you'd rush home to watch them. Bear in mind that television then was three channels, and so pop music in any sense was really limited. There was Ready Steady Go on a Friday, Top Of The Pops had started, but you didn't get a lot. You didn't get a lot of kids with guitars, especially with long hair and flared trousers that were glamorously American. But the real thing came when the tunes that they had were so good. Every week you watched the show and every week there'd be a great song at the end. You had to have one of their records, and this was the album that I had. There are so many varying styles of songs on this record. You'd go from syrupy ballads to something a lot tougher, but most of the character in the work was really about the melodies and the tunes, many of which were written by Neil Diamond and people like that. It was weird that there was that whole stable of people sat in an office from 9-5, writing tunes. But they understood how it worked and how to do it, whereas with The Damned, for example, we didn't really get arrangements or dynamics when we tried to write until later on. But when you heard that variation in, if you like, quality music- and it was quality music, The Monkees, even though saying that would've got you hung back in the 70s- it made it okay to be diverse. So when The Damned moved on and we started getting to Machine Gun Etiquette and Strawberries and those kinds of records it was fair game to do something that wasn't a raucous three chord punk song, because we'd grown up with all of these bands that I'm talking about, and actually they all seemed to show an element of that. So it rubbed off."

"It's a unique combination of what Zack de la Rocha is doing with his voice and what Tom Morello [guitarist] is doing. If you separate the two, you find yourself thinking: "Well, how could this possibly work?" But again they were game changers. They came along at a time in Los Angeles when there was nobody else doing that style. I don't think anyone has done anything like that successfully. They were a band that were immersed in different kinds of activism and that was something that definitely caught my attention. Who else was doing that? Who was doing that and selling millions of records? And, of course, by doing that they were able to cross over into different scenes and different generations of people that could listen to that type of music. Some of the stuff on here is still just as relevant today as it was when it was released. It's just the intensity of some of those messages for me as a singer. He performs with such conviction. You have got to believe what Zack is saying and he makes you understand what he's talking about. That's the heart of what Rage is all about. They're all behind exactly what he's saying. There's been a lot made in recent years of the idea that bands don't have anything to say anymore, or that they're ambivalent now, but I think everyone is saying something. Even Priest have made a comment in 'Crossfire', where we talk about religion and gun violence. I think a lot of the time these messages just slip under the radar for some people. Priest have never pushed back from making a comment on things that we see in the world or that affect us and think need to be commented on. So I think it's definitely out there. It's just that bands are now doing it a lot more subtly than Rage did."