"That one was going to be the last track on the album, so we had to leave an emotional impact there. It wasn't hard to think like that, given the subject of the song. With a lot of Bowie's songs, you found you were not only being a musician, but a bit of an actor as well. You had to get in there and use your imagination at the same time as your drumming skills to communicate those lyrics with any sort of conviction. You didn't want to say: 'Go out and commit suicide', of course, so you had to find a way of playing it so it didn't communicate that but rather identified with how someone like that might feel at the end of the world – that whole concept. It's one of my favorite tracks. It doesn't need a lot from the drums, bass and guitar. There are times when it breaks down to just the bass drum, and that bass drum needs to be played with despair. So, it was interesting as an emotional song to play. Everything seemed to leave it hanging on that bass drum, so you couldn't play it flippantly. It was how you emotionally felt and getting that across with just your foot on the drum pedal. You look back on that track and think it was pretty risky – especially on his part!"

"I think Combat Rock has suffered a lot of bitching and whining because it’s when The Clash broke America. I was 17-years old when I heard 'Should I Stay Or Should I Go'. I wasn’t some hipster, punk dude. I didn’t know who The Clash were. I heard it on the radio. I heard 'Rock The Casbah' on the radio. Compared to a lot of other stuff being played it was like: “This is good!” For all the people who say it’s not London Calling, it’s not 'White Riot', well, I get that they were in the trenches and whatever. I’m not trying to disparage the early Clash but they matured into a proper rock band and they did something with it. Listen to 'Straight To Hell'. Fucking A! Listen to 'Know Your Rights'! I’ll be happy as a pig in shit if I can write a song as good as that. If they were ‘selling out’, you write 'Know Your Rights'! It’s why I picked Combat Rock. I don’t get where people are coming from who don’t like that record [sings the riff from 'Should I Stay Or Should I Go']. It doesn’t get any better than that. It’s a wonderful statement. I wish there was something out there right now as good as 'Straight To Hell'."

"I'd been into music for as long as I can remember, from being four years old. My dad bought me a record player when I was 11, and I went out and bought three albums: I had those Beatles double albums, the red and the blue, '62-'66 and '66-'70, I bought those, and I also bought Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones. That was the first Stones album that I bought. I actually wore it out, and parts of it became unplayable, even with halfpenny pieces on top of the stylus. For me, the Stones, when they pulled away from the Beatles' influence and became their own thing, it started with Beggars Banquet. It's those four albums - Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Exile and Sticky Fingers, I think are the greatest years of the Rolling Stones as an individual, this is what we do, we're not following the Beatles any more. And they did it with such glory that I could easily have chosen [another] one of those four albums for the same reason. Once again we seem to be talking about unsung heroes, one of the great things about those Stones albums is the brilliant engineering by Glyn Johns; I think Andy Johns was involved as well, but the engineering on those records is just awesome, awesome, awesome."

"Like many people I was stunned and saddened when the world lost Tony Horwitz. I had met Tony and his wife, Geraldine Brooks, at several book functions over the years, and I marveled at his comingling of journalism and storytelling, as he traveled the world in search of knowledge. I was introduced to Horwitz, as many were, with Confederates in the Attic. In this, unfortunately his last book, Horwitz travels the south again as he traces the footsteps of Frederick Law Olmsted, who would find fame and fortune as a landscape architect, with perhaps his crowning glory being Central Park in New York. Horwitz travels throughout the south and talks to people from all walks of life in an effort to figure out what has changed in America, or if it’s always been so divided. And if there is a pathway forward to forge a national consensus on anything. Like Bill Bryson has done in his travels, and Mark Twain did well over a century before, Horwitz has not simply written a book chronicling his journey, he has opened the heart of America, its majesty and its darkness for all to see. We all will miss Tony Horwitz and what he has brought to our collective conscience. If you’ve never read him, this would be an ideal place to start."