Andrew Stafford

He had very few supporters other than perhaps David Bowie being the most notable.

So he was a long way ahead of the curve before people really could see where rock was going.

He was a seer.

The person that probably had the biggest impact on me early was a guy called Paul Williams.

And he was the first really serious rock critic.

He started a magazine called Crawdaddy in 1966, well and truly before my time.

But in 1988, he wrote a book called The Map.

And I really connected with that because at that stage he was 37 and he'd moved away from rock and roll.

He'd fallen out of love with it.

He started with the premise of the book that he was an idiot.

He'd never heard a U2 album even or an REM record.

So he was like a lot of baby boomers who'd got stuck on the music of his youth and had never moved past it.

And so what he did was he got back out there and...

with a very open mind and open heart, and he fell in love with it all over again.

So he goes and sees everyone from Black Flag to the Jesus and Mary Chain to Prince.

And he wrote about all of them with great enthusiasm and passion.

And he recognizes something that was a really crucial idea behind Something to Believe in, too, that rock and roll or pop or hip hop, what have you,

it's a healing music and that most of all it's inclusive, it's for everyone.

And what I really liked about Paul Williams' style more than anything was that a lot of bad music writing is like a lot of bad rock music in that it's overcomplicated.

Williams was the person who was trying to develop a dialect for talking about rock music