“I love this picture so much. I’ve actually never seen it before. I think we look really good as a band. I know what I was thinking and why I wanted to look like that. There’s a film by The Monkees called Head and the opening scene is Mickey Dolenz jumping into San Francisco Bay and drowning. And that look was pretty much taken from him, although the tartan would have been a nod to the punk thing as well.

“I think it was about the second or third time we’d been to LA. I was wearing hippie beads and the T-shirt was a Fred Perry in a kind of small mesh fabric, with the really fine corduroy jacket. We were definitely going to Melrose Avenue at that time, the thrift stores, but I’d suggest we looked like classic 1966 Los Angeles there, especially Jon Baker and Rob [Collins] and John Brookes’ hair. Could be The Byrds walking up to the Whisky A Go Go, you know?”

“Arriving at Knebworth, that’s a big Spiewak jacket. Very ‘cagoule’. It was certainly the look of the time. For the actual show, I had something quite 1970s looking on, a kind of velvet shirt that was probably opened up one button too many. I don’t have chest hair, but, in my mind, I would have been pretending to reveal some.

“Obviously, Oasis were a huge band then and they’d asked us to play. But there were lots of bands that were there over the two nights I felt I had an affinity with. And it wasn’t just the Manic Street Preachers. It was The Chemical Brothers and Prodigy. Even though we were all completely different, we all kind of recognised each other. It does show that there was more variety back then than people would’ve imagined.”

“I remember that show very well. I met Ladyhawke before I went on stage and we decided that we were going to work together on my solo album, so that was really exciting. That leather jacket was a homage to [New Order’s] Bernard Sumner during the ‘Thieves Like Us’ period. It’s a vintage leather. Someone said it actually was Bernard’s, but I don’t know whether that’s true or not. It’s hung up at The Charlatans’ studio. It’s part of our archive. It doesn’t even have a label inside any more, just loads of my old tour passes.

“On the bottom, it was classic 501s and brown brogues. Douglas Hart from The Jesus And Mary Chain had told me where to get the jeans from, a secondhand place in London. The hair was back to my bowl head, but this was a very dark brown. It was a more moody kind of thing than the blonde bob now. The look reflected the music. We’d just done a track called ‘You Cross My Path’, which was quite angry.

“With a jacket like that, it’s got to be secondhand. I don’t know whether it’s my age or not, but for me to wear something crisp and brand new, it reminds me of getting a brand-new leather jacket when I was a kid. I spent a long time putting studs in it and writing ‘Discharge’ on the back. GBH, Crass, Conflict… anything with a kind of angry name that works for the teenage brain.”

“With the hair like that, it can get really dry. I’m learning all the time, so I’m always taking tips from people, oils and things to make it less dry. And hair straighteners are pretty good, but I don’t iron it super-straight. I have to have a little bit of a kink in there. I love it when the roots are showing by about two inches. I think it looks great. If I’m doing it myself, then I hate it for a few weeks because it just looks like a helmet, so if I go and get it done by a professional, I ask them to leave a tiniest little bit of root showing.

“That’s a kind of painter’s jacket. It’s a vintage one – I’ve had that for so long, maybe 15 years, and it just felt right to be wearing it with my hair like that. It’s really old, but I felt that it’d be nice to stick to a classic look. On stage, I have to feel like I can move freely. And you can see it in a photo like that. It doesn’t look static at all. Put it this way, I’ve certainly never ironed anything and I wouldn’t want that kind of stiffness in how people perceive me.”

“The plain white T-shirt is pretty much a great look for me onstage. There’s a lot of people at those shows. I’ve got to think of the people at the back, so if the lights are on me, I’m definitely illuminated. I was quite sad when American Apparel closed down. If I find any old stock, I’ll be buying, like, 10 white T-shirts at a time. There’s also an American Apparel necklace of a little dinosaur that my son really liked.

“I still have that beautiful jacket from Rains. I think a lot of people were wearing them that year. And with sunglasses, they were often cheap ones. I’m actually a glasses wearer, so if I do wear sunglasses I can’t really see. When I was in Los Angeles and driving around a lot, that was a problem, so I started getting prescription sunglasses made up. I really like Ace & Tate at the moment.”

“This is white socks, white American Apparel T-shirt, corduroy boilersuit and Dr. Martens. I just liked the idea of a boilersuit. Whether it’s Steve Albini-influenced, which it possibly is, or whether it’s just the idea of wearing workman gear, I’m not sure, although yesterday I interviewed John Grant and I called myself a conversation mechanic because I was the interviewer and he liked that even though it’s cheesy as fuck.

“The DMs were brand new and probably hurting my feet at the time. I forget about having to wear them in. I think it hurts more now than it ever did. Maybe my skin’s softer or something as I’m now in my fifties. But if someone gives them to me, they’re so beautiful to look at and so classic, that I think I have to do it. When I’m out like this, people just talk to me all the time. I don’t know whether they recognise me. I don’t think they do. I think they just want to talk to me.”