Thurston, who or what first inspired you to pick up a guitar?

TM: “I had an older brother who brought one into our household so, all of a sudden, there it was. I didn’t really have any aspiration to become a guitar player but I thought that it was maybe the coolest instrument to play.

"I would invariably break it out of its case when he was away, wire it up to the stereo system and play it, but there weren’t any role models for me that I thought I’d be able to play like.

"Those were my inspirations because I was like, ‘Well, I don’t have to play traditional guitar!’'

"I didn’t really take it so seriously until ’76, when I heard the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, and then I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I can do that... and I like doing that’. I started actually coming up with songs on guitar, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I can give this to the Ramones!’ The first thing I wrote was a song called, I Don’t Wanna Mow The Lawn No More!”

Glenn Branca was an important influence, wasn’t he?

TM: “Well, I had these ideas of what a guitar maybe could do, but I never really thought about altered tunings or anything like that. Then I saw Glenn Branca play at some loft gig in New York around ’77 and he was actually accomplishing what I was hearing a little bit in my head.

"He had six guitars, a drummer and a bass player and it was just really ferocious, and they were going through these long movements. I was like ‘How’s he f **king getting that sound?’ Then I realised that he was tuning guitars to single notes. One guitar was all high Es, another guitar was low Es, another guitar was in Ds, and so on. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting!’ and I tried doing it, tuning just to one note.

"I think from there I just started fooling around with tuning the pegs and just coming up with different ideas of tunings. It was fairly naïve, but seeing him was certainly a catalyst.”

Which other guitarists were important to you back in the late 70s?

TM: “I loved bands like Teenage Jesus [And The Jerks] and The Contortions, where the guitar players were women who were just playing slide and they weren’t exactly playing traditional guitar.

"Those were my inspirations because I was like, ‘Well, I don’t have to play traditional guitar!’ I just wanted to write songs and I wanted to be in a band and I wanted to have a guitar make noise and I wanted to be subservient to the song... so I just kind of taught myself my own way, but I wasn’t snobbish. I wasn’t like ‘Oh, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page are worthless’, or anything, like the way punk was.

"I always really appreciated high-technique guitar playing, but I realised that that wasn’t what I was going to do. I just wanted to be radical and experimental with it, and I never really thought of myself as being a guitar player, per se. I was just using the guitar as a means to an end, and so I was very attracted to other guitar players who were like that.”