Andrew Stafford

But actually, he was just using very plain language.

And he was writing in the first person.

So what he did was really emotionally direct.

And it was like he was channeling the music that moved him directly onto the page.

And his prose was really melodic.

And so when you heard what he was talking about...

He could kind of recognise it because he'd nailed it the first time around.

And that sort of very melodic style of writing is something that I've aspired to ever since and tried to emulate without being an imitator.

I think we'll skip to 1996 now and we'll talk about a celebrated oral history called Please Kill Me by Legs McNeill and Gillian McCain.

This is one of the most influential music reads ever.

Not necessarily in a great way either, by the way, which we'll come back to.

But it's subtitled The Uncensored Oral History of Punk and that's pretty much what it is.

A guy called Richard Lloyd, who was the...

one of the two guitar players in television wore a t-shirt on stage that said, please kill me.

And the book traces punk's history from Detroit in the 60s, the Stooges and then the MC5, Stooges being Iggy Pop's band, we talked about him a moment ago, through to the New York scene and then across the Atlantic to London.

And the thing about Please Kill Me that's

So riveting is that actually there's not a lot of music writing here, really.

It's just a bunch of really charismatic people told in their own words.

There's no narrative in between their quotes.

It's absolutely scurrilous.