"I can't say enough about this album. I heard that when The Stooges came out everyone thought they were retro garage band not realising they were pointing the way forward to punk. Every song on Is This It is amazing. I played 'Modern Age' for my daughter the other day, and just for that song alone it could be one of the greatest albums. I was there for the making of the record and I was so blown away by their dedication to making this perfect music and executing it perfectly every night. It was crazy. These guys would really yell at each other if they missed one chord or beat. They were perfectionists. They were the first band of my age group who were great. There's a level of precision that The Strokes brought to making their music and their approach to it – the way Fab tried to emulate a drum machine in his playing – it feels obvious to people now but it was counter-intuitive at the time, no one had done that. Everything about Is This It was a statement in the opposite direction to what everyone else was doing. Before this the trend was for people make albums that sounded like they were performed in arena, they're soaked with reverb, Is This It is this weird insular record with the distorted vocals. People were confused by the decisions that were made when it was made when it came out, but now you hear it copied infinitely. It's funny that for a band that were criticised for being retro they've now come to define their own times."

"I guess I probably knew Dylan before I knew about The Band and kind of found The Band through Dylan. But I like the way that all of them sing. The three of them in particular, they've got really great, really characterful voices. And they do that thing of switching voices so you get the first verse with Rick Danko and then the bridge will be Robbie Robertson and that changes the perspective and stuff. And that's something that when Gang Of Four started, by the time we got to Entertainment!, one of the things we wanted was different characters. I kind of saw songs sometimes as being a little play, a little drama, so you have different characters. You have the main protagonist and maybe the other voice would be making comments about that character or somebody else would be a different character. To a certain extent, some of that came from The Band, I think. They're a weird bunch, they came from Canada, ended up in America and they kind of drew parallels between themselves and North American history and the way a lot of Canadians ended up in New Orleans and they called them Acadian driftwood. And they kind of sing about aspects of the Civil War and stuff like that. And also they've got a sense of history. It's very much not standard rock & roll subject matter, you know. It's not cars, girls, guitars, and I love that. And they're emotionally touching. They didn't have easy lives, things didn't pan out brilliantly. I'm touched by the way that you can hear their struggles through life in their music and what they're saying."