"I was really into them for a long time in the 70s and it coincided with early drug influences and when I jumped from the kind of psychedelia that the Beatles put forth to kind of what was happening in our own backyard on the West Coast with the Airplane and the Dead and Quicksilver.. The Beatles stopped so I never got the chance to see them, but the Dead came around a lot and so you got to see those bands. The Grateful Dead delved really deep into acoustic music, that was really important, and later their famous electric records, but Anthem of the Sun was in their early period. One of the things I keep talking about with my new record Electric Trim is that it was really created in the studio and I keep mentioning Dark Side of The Moon or Pet Sounds or Revolver or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when I should be referencing Anthem of the Sun Anthem of the Sun was the kind of record that they were trying to construct in a studio. It’s a studio experience of a live concert experience, so they were mixing all this stuff they recorded in all the studio with all these different live takes, slowing things down and speeding things up and thinking of all these trippy aspects of the way the sound exists in stereo space. A couple of those guys, especially Phil Lesh trained alongside Steve Reich at school and studied Luciano Berio and all this 20th century modernist stuff, so he was aware of where music was going on that level and they were just at a cross roads where they weren’t sure they wanted to be a straight ahead rock band. They had moments of being a rock dance band and then they had other aspirations. I love listening to Anthem of the Sun because it may not be perfect, or achieved what they really wanted, but it’s one of those records that set its sights really high and whether or not it got all the way there it achieved something really unique. There’s not many records that sound like that, not just the fact they were splicing together live tapes from 30 different gigs, it was kind of a ridiculous stoned or drugged task from the beginning but they threw their back against the wheel, and tried to do it. If you ever listen to that record with headphones it’s so rich. I was really into them for a long time but once New York City punk and all that stuff happened I kind of dropped it like a hot potato and went onto other stuff and it was only in the last 7 or 8 years that I’ve come back to my appreciation of it through a number of different avenues. I was involved a couple of years ago with this record that this group The National put together called Day of the Dead where they covered 60 songs or something and they asked me to cover ‘Mountains of the Moon’. There were a couple of good Dead songs I was listening to at the time because they related to a song I was doing for my record with The Dust – Last Night on Earth and when I went to record with them they played me a lot of the songs they were working on and whether you like 30 minute noodling electric guitar solos or not you can put that aside and say the thing that impressed me about what they were doing was how great their song writing was. Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter especially, wrote a lot of amazing songs together and that’s what really struck me – that’s why I liked these guys way back when because they had really great songs. Their songs are like the 60s era American songbook. And it was also in this period where I was thinking that I wanted a lyrical collaborator and so the idea of Hunter’s role with Garcia in that band especially or like when Dylan turned to either Robert Hunter or Jacques Levy for inspiration when he was working on Desire Dylan doesn’t need a lyrical collaborator - why’s he working with outside lyricists? And yet at some point he thought “I need someone else to shift the viewpoint”. So that’s what inspired me to ask Jonathan Lethem to work on Electric Trim. We’d known each other for a long time and I just felt like this was a good time to get someone else’s input, put another voice in the mix. Every single aspect of the record, words, lyrics, tunes didn’t have to spring from me. Music can be very collaborative and I’ve kind of come up in a very collaborative situation with Sonic Youth for so many years – every song was listed as all four of us writing it, ‘cos that’s ultimately what happened. In Sonic Youth, it was only a very rare occasion where one of us came in and said, “Hey I’ve got a new song this is how it goes…”

"You asked for albums, but albums are already a bit away from pop because of they're a more serious proposition, so all of these are albums that I own on vinyl, and because I'm of a certain age that's what I think of as a record. We didn't have a big record collection in our house when I was growing up, but my mum had three Beatles albums, Sgt Pepper, Revolver and Abbey Road. Even though I was a kid I could tell that Sgt Pepper and Revolver sounded like music that had happened a while ago, but Abbey RoadM sounded more modern. It still does sound quite modern, because on second side where all the songs run into each other, that's quite a thing, not many people had done that since and not many have since. There's an art to an album. If you've got an album that's got a shit song on it, especially if it's in the middle of a side, you're not going to play it as much because you know you're going to have to get up and skip that track. That's what I've tried to do with these, it's records that I don't mind putting on then you can relax or talk to people or whatever, but you know you're not going to get some kind of fucking horrible shitty stinker of a song on it. Abbey Road - I was young at the time, 10, 11, 12, whatever, and the track that ends side one, 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' that was mind-blowing to me, the way it went on and on and on at the end, with this big synthy wooshy noise. I've since found out its Ringo playing this machine that sounds like wind that you get in classical orchestras. It was a psychedelic experience in a living room in a normal part of Sheffield in the early 70s, where, you know, psychedelic experiences weren't that common. I'll always remember it, that song in particularly took me somewhere. And that's the end of that side - if you had Abbey Road on CD it wouldn't be right, it only really works as a statement if you listen to it for ages and then it suddenly stops and then you're left in silence for a while until you can be bothered to get up and start again. I started with this because it plays with what an album can be. It's great.
"

"When I think about why I love Queen my head just fills with every single Queen song that I know by heart. It's just like a box of Quality Street. Everything is amazing. The reason that I've chosen the second album is because the song 'Ogre Battle' is on there, which is one of my favourite tracks. It's rare that you struggle to label a band. If you're a heavy metal band you're meant to look and sound like a heavy metal band but you can't really call Queen anything. They could be a pop band one day or the band that wrote 'Bicycle Race' the next and a full-blown metal band the next. In terms of the depth of the musical landscape that they covered, it was very similar to some extent to the Beatles. I mean 'Helter Skelter' was a pretty heavy track, and 'Yellow Submarine' really wasn't. I think Queen have a lot of similar ingredients. Everybody was writing the songs as well, so Freddie was writing differently to John Deacon, and then John was writing differently to Roger [Taylor, drummer]. They were all accepting each other though, and nobody was sat there saying that they couldn't do something because it didn't sound like Queen. If it was a good song they'd record it, and this album is nothing but good songs. It's a style that we've tried to adopt into Judas Priest. A good song is a good song at the end of the day, and there's no point in wasting time arguing about whether Priest are supposed to sound like the British Steel record or the Painkiller record or whatever. I felt such a sense of loss when Freddie died, but he fucking loved his life. He partied like a maniac. I've lost a lot of friends to AIDS and it's such a terrible thing to have to suffer through. Such a cruel condition to be taken by. From what I've seen and heard there's a horrible sense of loss in those early days. There was a lot of rejection and almost pariah-like status heaped upon you by people. And it's still around today, which is so sad and unfair. It's interesting though, because I don't know if Freddie would still have been doing what he did now. Would he still be going out on the road with Brian and Roger, who, by the way, I love? Especially Adam [Lambert]. But Freddie would have been 70-something I think, and I get a feeling that at some point, he would have just said, "I've had enough now darling." We lost him, but he left behind such an incredible legacy and canon of work. I listen to Queen almost every day still."

"It is the British version of the album I am talking about [the US release would include '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction'] and mostly because of the cover, which I think is probably my favourite ever picture of The Stones. If we are on that subject, it says quite a lot about Mick Jagger as a frontman that he was secure enough to be only third from the front on the cover of the early records. When you look at Out Of Our Heads it looks like Brian Jones' or Keith Richards' group. Mick is just peering in from the side. That's how cool Jagger was - most singers are always pushing people out of the way so they can be at the front. Out Of Our Heads is often entirely overlooked within The Stones' catalogue. I love it because before that, on the previous albums, they were attempting to recreate the music of their heroes in an almost academic manner, with only a certain amount of success. What gave those early records credibility was that they were aficionados and experts and that was something, besides The Beatles, which was exciting to British kids. However, they hadn't really put their own mark on their music. Out Of Our Heads moved away from blues into what then was called rhythm and blues. They were much better at appropriating that style, than they were pure blues music. There are more chords, less rootsy themes and [the songs are] more about 'finding a girl and losing a girl' and so Jagger is more believable on that album. Overall, musically, the songs just suited their style better. Out Of Our Heads is a band just about to hit their stride and about to turn into their own songwriting machine. There is almost no other record like it. I think you could argue that if you want to really discover what The Velvet Underground were inspired by, it is probably Out Of Our Heads. Not just in terms of how the band look, but the evidence is there in the version of Marvin Gaye's 'Hitch Hike', which obviously the Velvets chopped on 'There She Goes Again' - and I used on 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out'. There was a point where I was into The Stones more than any other band on the planet. I found out everything there was to find out about them - about the band, about Andrew Oldham and how they made their records. That investigation was really good for me. When I formed The Smiths, they were probably the biggest influence in terms of the politics and the blueprint for a band, including the dynamic between the guitarist and the singer. When I was trying to get The Smiths together, I took the behaviour of Andrew Oldham and Brian Jones in their resourcefulness, desperation and ingenuity as the MO of The Stones as a working unit, as a source of inspiration - which was a pretty unusual thing to do in 1982."

"People say Lee Mavers is mad or a tortured artist but he isn’t. He’s just lazy. Well, either that or he doesn’t want to tarnish the reputation of what he knows he’s already achieved. I’ve got two CDs worth of unreleased stuff which would knock you out. It should have been released as an album but it won’t see the light of day. But you see them when they reform and they’re still playing the same set as they were in 1986. You feel like saying to them, 'For fuck’s sake…' When I see him I say, 'Hey Lee, when are you going to release your second album?' And he goes, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll do it when I’ve finished the first one…' He’s still trying to nail his first set of songs right after 27 years. So I’ve come to the conclusion he’s either shit-scared of ruining his legacy or he’s just a lazy cunt. All that said though, this is a wonderful album and I do get a great kick out of playing this to people round the world – Americans in particular – to people who have never heard of them. They’re always, 'Wha… What the fuck?' Even though it’s a standard form of guitar rhythm and blues, it’s totally unique. Nobody has done it as good as him since. His lyrics are great, his voice is amazing and the whole vibe of The La's is amazing. Bands from Liverpool used to be really busy but there came a point after the 1980s where unless it was something happening in Liverpool, they just didn’t give a fuck. Liverpool is an island. It bears no relation to what’s going on musically anywhere else at all. I’ve got one scouser in my band and three on my crew and they don’t give a fuck. They don’t care what’s going on in London, they’re still going on about the dockers’ strike. They’re still annoyed that The Beatles left to go to London! [puts on old school scouse accent] 'I’m not havin’ it la, they went shite when they left Liverpool. You ask anyone. They did nothin’. After they left The Cavern, they were nothin’.' And now Liverpool bands get to a certain stage and then they back off because that means you have to move to London and they don’t want to. Liverpool has also suffered for not having a great record label or TV station like Factory or Granada. In more modern times they’ve been in the shadow of Manchester because of that. But that is also their strength. There is no other band of musicians in the world I would sooner play with than a band of scousers. They’ve all got it. And they’re all stoned from breakfast to bedtime. People in Liverpool got Oasis before anyone else did. We played all our early gigs with The Real People. Most people thought we were a Liverpool band."