"I thought we ought to have one classical album as I do play a lot of classical music at home. I thought about Chopin’s Nocturnes but they didn’t change anything. The Rite Of Spring really was, for me, the first punk album. It was the most uncompromising vision. In the period it was done, no one was doing anything like Stravinsky. He was writing parts for instruments that didn’t have those notes, so they had to have new ones made with extra notes so the orchestra could play that piece. That’s forward thinking. The whole story of the making of the album is so fantastic – that Stravinsky has no money and Coco Chanel comes along and invites him to live at his house and Stravinsky sits in a room alone writing all these parts for all these instruments. It’s extraordinary and a remarkable achievement. Then, the fact that on the opening night in a swishy Parisian theatre the audience hated it. They think it is the most terrible row and now it is acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century. It’s too good a story and I admire his commitment and his inventiveness and his absolute passion to making that record work. You listen to it and think "how did anyone ever do that?" Anyone who hasn’t heard The Rite Of Spring and likes music should really take a listen."

"It was such a turning point, this album. I remember putting it on the Dansette and 'Purple Haze' coming on, and those opening notes, and going bloody hell I want this. When you hear something that really works for you it's almost not a conscious decision. It's a chemical reaction that your ears and your soul have. I heard it and it was like being grabbed on the inside and told you're going to go with this. You like this, whether you want to or not. I've pretty much always had a copy of this album, and I don't think it does everything that Jimi Hendrix does best, but it does a lot of it. I think he was very smart because he never overdid the solos, certainly not on this album. They're all fairly short songs. And also seeing the cover, back then, it was like wow, here's this black bloke, and he's dressed as a hippy. That was quite a shocking image for then, and you knew it was going to be great, just by looking at it. But it had that terrible lettering on the cover and it said ""Smash Hits"" and you immediately went oh my god, because that was what you had every Christmas, those K-Tel Smash Hits records. You never expected a serious musician, let alone one who played like that, to have that kind of title."