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The music we made then was so amateurish, compared to the rest of mainstream pop or rock and roll. But what differentiated us from what everybody else was doing in the business was the fact that you could tell that these people came from different reference areas.

I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse.

Pop music has progressed.

The whole world has changed much since the '80's. In the united States, rap music and country music dominate radio and that certainly wasn't the case in the early '80's.

My input for the first 16, 17 years of my life was AM radio, FM radio - pretty mainstream stuff. Rolling Stone was probably as edgy as it got.

Rock n' roll unchained a nation and revolutionized radio and the record industry, not to mention the motion picture business.

I was inspired by the classic rock radio of the Seventies. They separated Chuck Berry and the Beatles from the Led Zeppelins and Bostons and Peter Framptons of the time. In many ways, classic rock became bigger than mainstream rock.

I come from a time when pop music was the coin of the cultural realm and in a certain way was the only coin of the realm; movies didn't matter as much, and not TV - it was all about pop music. In the era when I started - which was the early '60s - it was all about singles leading to albums.

So many of the bands that influenced me growing up were English, even if I didn't realise it. English pop ruled the world in the '80s!

I think a lot of people came into rock n' roll to try to change the world. I came into rock n' roll to make music.