"Bands have their anthems, you know, 'You Shook Me All Night Long', all that for AC/DC sure. For Those About To Rock is the call to arms, it's the definitive anthemic album. Back In Black probably had better songs, but the band started to have a sense of itself because a band stands or should stand for something, like when you have a country you have a flag for that country. But when a flag stands for something, it takes on a meaning of its own, and then people realise that the flag doesn't just represent the country, but it represents what the country stands for. The platform - in our case, platform boots. So, For Those About To Rock We Salute You is what AC/DC is all about. The graphics and that cannon and the title - and it's why they always end their set with it - it's anthemic. 'You Shook Me All Night Long' is probably the best song they've written in my estimation, but it's not an anthem. It's because the lyrics aren't on that same level. They aren't big and bold. 'For Those About To Rock (We Salute You)' means something, it's a connection. It's like nationhood. Put your fist up in the air and say, 'Yeah! This is what I believe in!' 'You Shook Me' doesn't have that, it's just a rockin' great song. When the band realises its own meaning, when a band can see itself clearly, that's when it connects. It happened to us on Destroyer. That album cover had no guitars on it, no drums, no guitars, no stage, nothing. That's when we understood that we were bigger than the music we played. But you don't see that until someone points that out to you. When you start to see your face in parades and on walls and on tattoos and all that. And when you see that there just aren't any guitars or drums in there. People are attracted to the personas. The personas are bigger than the guitars. Whereas, it's hard to have an image of AC/DC without a guitar. Without a guitar, you would say, 'Who's that?' The same goes for Metallica or almost anybody. They're musicians. We are iconic images. That's fine for me. That's bigger. That's part of pop culture."

"There's A Riot Goin' On is an abstract, nihilistic, urban death funk record. Sly documents the times better than anybody – 1971: the whole civil rights movement has been crushed by the murders of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and the whole American state dismantled the Black Panther party. Sly Stone documents the dread and the suffocation of those times. His music before that was transcendent and joyous with stuff like 'Everyday People', which was basically life-affirming music. Then from about 1969, '70, he starts to become darker with these new funk sounds. Even the hit single from the record, 'Family Affair', is dark. He would have never written that four years prior. It was like the utopian idealism of the '60s had gone and America was almost at war with itself. But Sly never made this a political record – his aim was to put the American flag on the cover with no writing on it. The lyrics were internalised, it was kind of like a closed-off, looking-inward record. There's no reverb on this record and it's completely dry. There's no real joy in the record."

"She made three in the series, this, then II and III. This one is about hardcore punk in L.A. in the early ’80s so there’s a lot of Black Flag and that whole scene. Its aesthetic was one of the main influences that Chris Blauvelt and I used for Mid90s – for the way things looked, the way the backstage in the apartment looked, for the 16 mm. It’s a remarkable and encompassing snapshot of a scene that I’m personally drawn to, and the ethics and aesthetics of the film are as fucked up and raw as what it’s depicting. The crazy thing is that Penelope Spheeris started as a punk doc maker and ended up directing broad ’90s comedies - she made Wayne’s World (1992)! She also made Suburbia (1983), which is amazing, and another influence for Blauvelt and I. The main thing I did when I became a known as a an actor and had access to people and filmmakers, was me saying, like, “Hi, I’m the kid from Superbad, can I please have all the Decline movies?” That’s how I abused fame at that time."