"This is the pinnacle of the 'magic four' line up. I discovered Alice Cooper when he did School's Out: I thought it was great. It was all the bits of glam that I liked. It was theatrical in a comical way. Cooper was an American band that seemed very British - there wasn't a great deal of difference between them and, say, Wizzard to me. I heard School's Out, went down town with my mum and brought two Alice Cooper albums - Love It To Death and Killer for about five shillings each. I got School's Out the next week and loved the theatrics. I really got into Cooper - 'Halo of Flies' etc. It was horror music, way ahead. I laugh when people try to tell me Marilyn Manson is scary: I think 'you weren't around in 71, mate'. Then of course, knowing the albums inside out a year later, out comes Billion Dollar Babies - it has this fantastic opening song 'Hello Hooray' which has this amazing guitar part at the start. And then 'Raped And Freezing' and 'Elected'. There was a really dark psychedelic edge to it. They felt like a band in charge of what they were doing. It was glamorous; it was exotic; it was dangerous. That was the kind of stuff that I liked."

"Frank Zappa's glorious Straight label gave us Captain Beefheart, Alice Cooper, the GTO's and this absurdly eclectic 1969 album by sardonic folk-blues-comedy-rock-cabaret belter Judy Henske and hubby Jerry Yester of the New Christy Minstrels and the Modern Folk Quartet. No two tracks sound like the same band (or even singer), thanks to Henske's radical versatility and Yester playing ten different instruments; but unlike the Turtles' equally perversely wide-ranging The Turtles Present The Battle Of The Bands, no track sounds much like anyone else either. "

"An absolute fucking testament to paranoia, to anger, and to blame. It's fantastic. 'They're out to get me, they won't catch me, I'm fucking innocent'... that's just fucking brilliant, absolutely brilliant. It's a youth anthem. Things like this weren't really addressed: the paranoia of it all. The dark side of life wasn't really looked at in rock, apart from theatrically, with Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper. It wasn't really looked at sociologically, and in my opinion Guns N' Roses were one of the first bands to tackle it properly. All the fantasies and romanticism that had gone before were there, but there was also a gritty side to it. The comedown side to it. The real side to it."

"There is certainly a rasp to my voice [LAUGHS]. It's not quite as bad as Bonnie Tyler's but it is raspy. Rod Stewart wasn't a big influence on me as a singer though. I don't really sound like anybody. In the same way that Ozzy doesn't sound like anybody or Alice Cooper doesn't sound like anybody. You get these boyband singers now that are all very similar. Even in the old days, you could swap round some of the Motown singers and you wouldn't really know the difference. Singer wise, I loved Mark Bolan; Noddy Holder; David Bowie; Alex Harvey; Russell Mael; Steve Harley; Brian Ferry; Sammy Hagar; Phil Lynott. All that lot go into a bucket but I still don't sound like any of them [LAUGHS]. Mutt Lange was a huge influence on my singing: he can play anything, do anything. He was pushing and pushing. I remember the first time I ever met Lou Gram from Foreigner. He said: 'tell me, did Mutt make you feel like you couldn't sing either?' and this was fucking Lou Gram, right? He'd make you do it again and again. He would push and push until you'd be right on the edge of losing it. Sometimes that worked and sometimes you felt like your spirit was being destroyed. Physically, you're going into spaces in your head and your chest cavity that you've never been. But he would've done it with anybody: look what he did with Brian Johnson, he put him through the bloody ringer with Back In Black but look what he got out of it. And that's why I don't complain. Rod Stewart was the first album I ever bought with my pocket money. The version of 'I'm Losing You' is just genius but my 'in' to that record, as it were, was 'Maggie May' because it was all over the radio at the time. It was rock but it was pop rock: it's not been influential in terms of how we sound but I absolutely love it."