"This had a profound effect on me when I was really young. I was maybe eleven or twelve years old when I saw The Who play ‘My Generation’ on a TV show called The Smothers Brothers Show. I was sitting with my brother, sister and parents and I just freaked out at how powerful they were. Watching Keith Moon, I just couldn’t understand what he was doing. I’d never seen anyone play like that before, he blew up his bass drum at the end of the performance, it was unbelievable and that’s when I told my parents I wanted to get a drum set. My mum said “Well, if you want to get a drum set you’ll have to take lessons and keep up your piano lessons too.” I promised I’d do both and kept up my piano lessons for about a year, but then I dropped them and focussed on the drums and started trying to figure out how to play Rock and Roll. The Who are in my top five bands of all time, in my home studio in Los Angeles I’ve got photos of them spread throughout the studios and the hallways. They had everything, they looked cool, Pete Townsend was an incredible writer, the way he played the guitar with windmills and swooping arm movements, Roger Daltrey was a great singer and an iconic frontman and John Entwistle’s bass runs held the band together. They had an incredibly unique sound. I still love this song, it’s in my top ten greatest rock songs ever written. It speaks to the essence of the confusion of adolescence and even the confusion of being an adult and what kind of world we live in. It never gets old, it’s a constant recurring theme that every generation of kids grows up with."

"It's really weird: I kind of had a bit of a problem with The Teardrop Explodes. I really didn't like them as a group, and it's very strange because our recording desk in Cardiff… I think Kilimanjaro was recorded on it. But as soon as Julian Cope left Teardrop Explodes I just completely turned onto him, and especially this record, because it's brilliant. There's some benchmark songs on here, which are hard for anybody to top. There's one called 'Bill Drummond Said' which is just fucking brilliant, and there's a song called 'Reynard The Fox', which is just… he does such a brilliant job of having a narrative of why he disagrees with something but pitching it in such a beautiful way. And there's 'The Bloody Assizes'; Julian Cope, now, has this afterlife of being this writer who seems to mix the high-rise block of ideas in his head with reality. It's really amazing. And he's become some sort of historian about myth and Krautrock, and I loved one of his quotes when he did an interview for this book: "I only look like this because I feel like such a cunt when I'm crying inside all the time." This record shows why he's such a brilliant solo artist. It's got a lovely, bucolic flintiness to it. There's something about it; you realise he's detached himself from his previous life and The Teardrop Explodes, and he's just out there in the woods doing something. And you cannot like a record which has a cover of the artist's… you know. Naked inside a big turtle shell on the cover. I remember it got really mixed reviews, but I think a lot of people do consider it a classic. I do; he's done other good stuff, but it's his best record."