Andrew Stafford

yeah absolutely and there were hundreds if not thousands of songs that i could have chosen but what i tried to do was just let the story tell itself and songs would kind of come to me organically in the way that i told the story so for example early on i found myself writing almost entirely

by chance, about Golden Brown by The Stranglers.

And when I started doing that, I got a little frisson, a little thrill, and I thought, this is good, this is working.

And I just kind of stuck to that from that point onwards.

And it wasn't so spontaneous that it was random.

I mean, there were certain things that I did have in mind, obviously, some signature moments and some artists that kind of picked themselves, if you like.

So I was always going to talk about Minot Oil, for example, because they were the first band that I ever went to see in concert.

I was always going to talk about punk because that was...

That was a turning point for me as an adolescent.

Yeah, it did.

And even though I was coming to it 10 years too late because, you know, I was born in 1971 and

punk really got going in you know 1976 or so so I was coming to it you know around 1986 1987 but it was galvanizing because I think what punk did was that it spoke to people who felt marginalized and felt alienated in some way as a confused young adolescent you know it spoke to me as well

I think it's fair to say I've got a fairly strong outsider complex, to be honest.

So I'm probably drawn to music that has that element to it as well.

We could talk about Iggy Pop, for example, who is 72 now and he's a celebrated performer, probably one of the most dynamic live performers in rock history.

But when he was getting going with the Stooges in the late 60s and early 70s, his records sold very poorly.

No one wanted to know him.

I think after he recorded Raw Power in 1973, his next stop was a mental health institution at that point.

He was not in good shape at all.

As I said, no one really wanted to know his music at that point.