"London Calling is probably my favourite rock record of all time. It’s incredibly powerful and diverse, it’s social, political and has all sorts of musical genres - punk, rock, ska, ballads, jazz and dub - rolled into the song arrangements. The Clash were at their peak when they made it and the kick-off track is the most anthemic song they ever wrote. It’s got everything, brilliant lyrics, a brilliant performance, it just sounds killer and Mick Jones’ guitar playing is phenomenal, when you hear that guitar riff it’s like a fire alarm going off. ‘London Calling’ is like a call to arms, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up every time I hear it, it’s that powerful. I went to see them on that tour at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago and it was absolutely rammed. The second they started playing the entire room started jumping up and down and I thought the building was going to collapse, you could feel the whole place shaking. It was an old theatre and I was watching from the balcony, thinking we should maybe get to a safer location but I became so immersed in the music I forgot about it, it was a fantastic show. There were obviously differences between the British and US punk bands and some of that is in the sound of the records. The British records had a bit of a darker sound to them and that could be due to technical stuff in the mastering, but a lot of it had to do with the performances. To me, the British bands have always been ground-breaking, as a whole there were better new wave and punk bands coming out of the UK than the US, it was like the second British invasion. There was a great scene in New York, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Television and Blondie were ground-breaking at the time, but England, a country with a much smaller population than the US, had a larger percentage of iconic bands from that era."

"OMG, so I heard that in high school and I of course tried to sing along with it but as she's one of the best singers living or dead, she put the bar pretty high. I'd already learned projection, being able to project my voice by doing musical theatre as a kid, and she was somebody who could project really strongly, have a sweet sounding voice, a strong sounding voice; she had just a huge range. Definitely clever lyrics, her songs were the kind of songs you just wanted to belt out. I especially remember the song 'Do Right Woman, Do Right Man', it went, "So if you want/ A do-right-all-days woman/ You got to be/ A do-right-all-nights man", I was like, "What? You mean that you can ask your boyfriend that if you're supposed to be super awesome to him, he has to be super awesome to you back?" Because I always had awful boyfriends who were total dicks so I was like, "Wait, I deserve better?" Here was this woman telling me, "Look if you want me to stay home and not go running around, you gotta stay home and not go running around either, it's a two-way street here." She was basically staying: "I want equality in my relationship." That was a great message to me as high-school kids who had some pretty destructive relationships. Even though I wasn't really able to realise that until much later, it was a great thing to have in my head. I think my mum's boyfriend had her record so I was introduced to it because it was just there at home. I never had a huge record collection or anything, like five records. But when they started dating he had a bunch of records and I learnt about King Crimson, Van Morrison and Aretha Franklin.‬"