"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."

"I didn’t really know about ABBA when I was growing up, they’re one of those bands you think you’d get into through your parents, but my parents didn’t listen to them. I think the first time I heard them properly was in Muriel’s Wedding, obviously that wasn’t a cool thing so they became a kind of guilty pleasure, but when Mamma Mia! came out in my late teens I was ‘Damn, all of these songs are so fucking good.’ “I have this list of songs in my head that I think are perfect, obviously that’s completely subjective, but they’re untouchable pop masterpieces like ‘God Only Knows’, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and ABBA have so many of them. There’s a humanity in their songs but they also feel like ‘how could anyone have made something so perfect?’ The writing, the production, the arrangements, even the way their voices sound, it has the same effect as when siblings sing. Their voices are unbelievable, sometimes I think ‘is that a weird harmony?’ but it’s just the way their voices sound together, it’s incredible. “This song makes me well up because it’s so perfect, but it’s also so silly, it makes me want to throw my hands in the air, I want to dance when I hear it and I want to smile. You feel silly when you hear it, you feel camp and like a character in Muriel’s Wedding or Mamma Mia! when it comes on. It’s an amazing feeling and that is the power music isn’t it? “The other thing you have to remember is that one of the things that made The Beatles so amazing and such an interesting proposition and a reason why people really like The Velvet Underground as well, is because they changed the way songs were written, they rewrote the rulebook. Before then all music essentially sounded the same, everyone was using the same three or four chords and melodies, that kind of Rockabilly and Rock and Roll, all operating in the same framework, even the blues, The Stones and The Beach Boys, until they started breaking the rules too. But ABBA were making this music only ten or twenty years after pop music as we know it began to exist and it’s so innovative. “You know when people talk about their favourite bands? They’re a band who if you’re in a car, someone could put on an hour of ABBA and I’d like every song and there’s bands who I consider to be my favourite bands who I couldn’t say that about. It’s banger after banger, I guess it depends what mood you’re in, actually I was listening to them in a car the other day and someone told me to turn it off! “It’s mind-bending how good they are when they’re at their best. I think music is more often than not written about as art, but it’s also entertainment and whilst what they do is this incredible art it’s also so entertaining. It’s funny, we’ve been speaking about music for the last half an hour but this is the first time where we’ve talked about music making us happy and that’s really important. Music should make you happy and ‘Dancing Queen’ definitely does that."