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On the eve of the Ivor Novello Awards, Music Week asks a gaggle of the biz's biggest names the million-dollar question: Who is the greatest songwriter of all-time? Needless to say, consensus was hard to find...
Nicky Wire - Joe Strummer
"I like a lot of singer/songwriters but I always think the lyrics let them down. A songwriter for me, I always think of as a lyricist, whereas most people think of fucking music. At the moment, I've had a massive period of getting back into The Clash, which I haven't done for 10 years and I never thought I would. I realised what an influence Joe Strummer's lyrics were on me. We'd been rehearsing Garageland off the first Clash album to play on tour and every single word came back to me in an instant. At the moment I'm just overdosing on Joe Strummer really. There's plenty of others - obviously Morrissey at his peak was an absolutely huge influence on me growing-up because it led me into much more poetic kind of circles. The Clash got me into Allen Ginsberg and Morrissey got me into Oscar Wilde, so that was a kind of education."
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