London

About eight years ago I went to an exhibition at the Tate Liverpool of Turner’s paintings unframed. It was incredible to see them like that because you realised the true abstraction of the pictures. When you see his work in the big gilt frames you perceive it as being some kind of old thing that is more figurative than it really is. Although his early paintings certainly are figurative, those late works are just wild imagery. It’s pure expression.

When you realise the context in which he was doing these things, you see that he was inventing it. That’s the incredible thing about the guy. He changed the course of artistic expression in every respect. One of my favourites is ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’, because you can see the modernity in that painting. The train is not really painted in at all. You know it’s a train, but it’s barely there. There’s no detail, just these vaguely Brunel bridges disappearing into the distance. Never mind that Turner started impressionism, that painting is almost expressionism. Feature continues

He was a barber’s son and he was bluff and didn’t like people very much. In fact, he sounds like a bit of a misanthrope. I don’t know if I would have liked him, but I quite like the fact that I wouldn’t have, you know? He clearly didn’t like people, and as far as I know he was quite a lonely figure. You get the feeling he was a pretty angry character, or at least there was a lot of repressed rage in him. I can really understand that. Gomez have always had that desire not to belong – it’s the Groucho Marx thing: Who would want to join a club that would have someone like me as a member? There’s no point, because you’re just getting involved in the frivolous fickleness of it all, and I just can’t be bothered. I don’t want to have to filter everybody I meet and worry about who they are and what they do.

The great thing about Turner is that he was so brilliant that the establishment just had to accept him, but he never grew old gracefully. He didn’t mellow. He didn’t Monet. Quite the opposite, in fact. He got wilder and more catastrophic as he got older, which was wonderful. I love the fact that he wallowed in catastrophe to try and create these sublime pieces. There’s that story about him tying himself to the mast of a boat. Is that true? I don’t know, but it’s a good one! It’s like Jim Morrison getting his knob out at a gig. Did that happen or not – who cares?! You want it to be true. There is an amazing painting of his, ‘The Burning of the Houses of Parliament’, where you see the people of London watching this wild blaze. It seems amazing and incredibly poignant. Seeing it these days, it still resonates: man against this inferno. Not only is his work intended to be awe-inspiring, the scale of what he did is awe-inspiring. That’s what is so wonderful about him.

I love his sea paintings. I haven’t got the best sea legs in the world, but I’ve lived by the sea my entire life and I still like to live as close to it as I can. We recently did this mad thing in America where we played a festival on a cruise ship, floating around the Caribbean. The place was full of kids, all these addled children falling off the boat. As we were floating out of Jamaica we did our first set and the boat was just tilting everywhere. The water was splashing and the rain was pouring on to the stage – they were wrapping us in polythene on the stage. It was hilarious. But we realised at that point how many of our songs are about the elements: ‘Here Comes the Breeze’, ‘Drench’. We were just looking at each other, because the irony wasn’t wasted on us. It was pure Turner.

He’s an incredibly modern figure, because everything about him resonates. A lower-middle-class kid who makes good and creates art and is pretty pissed off with the people he has to hang around with: sounds like just about every rock star there is! It’s hard not to like him. We’re talking about my favourite Londoner, but really he is a contestant for the greatest ever British person.

The Turner Collection is at Tate Britain, Millbank, SW1P 4RG (020 7887 8008 / www.tate.org.uk/britain).