"I lived a stone's throw from Penny Lane, and my sister had Beatles wallpaper, my brother had a plastic Beatles wig and Beatles cap, and they were older than me, and my auntie Kathleen - who was a bit of a ... swinging sixties... a Liver bird, put it that way - came to live with us and she brought with her Sgt. Pepper's. She would go and see concerts like Gene Pitney at the Liverpool Empire and things like that. She was quite an interesting woman - to me anyway - and was great fun. I had one of those portable record players like you did in the 1960s, and I would play this over and over again while staring at the Peter Blake/Jann Howarth record sleeve, which made a 3D collage, and asking people ""who's this?"" and ""who is this?"". I've said it before, it was a bit like Dorothy opening the door of the house once it's arrived in Munchkinland, and everything goes technicolour from the black and white-ness of 1960s Liverpool. It was like a portal into things like the Hollywood musicals that I'd been seeing on the Saturday morning at the pictures. My auntie Kath would say, ""Ooh I saw The Beatles in the Liverpool passport office getting a passport while I was getting mine"" and my mum would go, ""I knew Julia when she used to look like Lucille Ball and she used to strut down the street"", and so it was Beatles saturation, living in that particular part of town. 'She's Leaving Home' on that album was the first song that made me cry, which I think is quite an important moment in your life, when a piece of music makes you cry. It was just the sadness of the story of a girl leaving home. Then of course there was 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds', 'A Day In The Life' and all those odd string arrangements. There was also the Magical Mystery Tour double EP in gatefold technicolour glory and things like that. It was like an entry into a world that was distant yet very close as well. It made me want to learn the lyrics to sing along and I guess it was just very important to me in my journey of music appreciation. And if you had the measles or chicken pox, you were quarantined to my sister's bedroom, and it was like a TARDIS of 'John Paul George Ringo' and it would drive you absolutely insane, as it was all you could read: 'John Paul George Ringo John Paul George Ringo John Paul George Ringo' and their smiling happy faces. It was kind of great and yet torturous at the same time. Pop torture."

"Jimi Hendrix is one of our local heroes in Seattle, and we only have a handful. He walked the same streets than we did. Interestingly enough, he had to come over here to break out. We were always proud to be from the same town that he came from. I remember in the very early days of this band, we would drive to the cemetery, go to his grave and crack a few beers or whatever. We knew that a lot of people did that too. So if we were low on weed, we could probably show up and always find at least a joint or two... Which we did more than a couple of times too [laughs]! People would leave guitar picks, half burnt roaches, sometimes full joints. And we would hang out with Jimi and smoke the pot that people left on his grave. He was a phenomenal guitar player. The band that he had, the trio on that record, it's legendary. Are You Experienced? is the first of his albums I was introduced to. And I still think it's the best. He was an innovator, he was extremely unique. He had a uniqueness that passed the test of time. And the only other guy, for me personally, to make that sort of a change, another guitar player of the same calibre that I kind of acknowledge as ""this guy is the fucking shit!"" is probably Eddie Van Halen, a couple of generations back."