"One of the bands that I watched in a backyard party that made me decide I wanted to be a musician had played the song '2112'. I heard that weird pedal effect at the beginning and thought, ""Are you kidding me?!"" That was the opening of a whole new world. I lost track of them after Permanent Waves when I started doing my own thing, but you can't ignore their legacy. Alex Lifeson is another with a really bizarre approach to guitar playing. It sometimes seems that his solos don't have a direction because they are like spurts of energy, almost like solar bursts. It's all so progressive to the point that when they do a comparatively straightforward song, it almost seems like they are dumbing things down – something like 'Working Man' for example, which is a simple rock track. But generally they are progressive rock at its very best and bands like Dream Theater owe a lot to them. Although Megadeth has progressive elements, I'm not a huge fan of pure prog as such. I respect the players because they are so talented, but to me it might feel like you're in a straitjacket. Incidentally, people have referred to Rust In Peace as being a progressive record, but in truth it was just where we were at the time. In fact I always saw it as a thrashy little metal record, as opposed to sounding like early Genesis or King Crimson where you dropped acid and went, ""Whoa dude…"" Not that I've ever done that, I should add…"

"I'm loyal to Weather Report's vision. I can understand how some people come in through the wrong door with them. This album is from a point where they're coming out of this improvisational period. Their first few albums were really exploratory and you had to be quite committed to them; they weren't instant records. But they had plenty of acclaim and backing from their record label. It's amazing that there was a point in time when record labels backed that kind of music. But this was the point when they were playing a lot of colleges and they added a more funky span to what they were doing. So the bass guitar started to get more prominent. It was Alphonso Johnson playing bass here and not Jaco Pastorious, and people forget that Alphonso Johnson did a lot of the groundbreaking stuff for the fretless bass. There's a painterly quality about this album and the orchestration gets more densely textured. You've got tracks like 'Jungle Book', that closes the album, and it's a beautiful track that could be put together by coloured pencils. It's a very pastel-y track where they've taken an improvisation and drawn round and over the top of it. Tracks like that are really funky. We didn't have ""world music"" back then, but this was the beginnings of that idea; of something beyond the horizon of our culture and something that was kind of hidden. It wasn't about doing an authentic version of ethno-musicology, but taking different elements; it was all about colours."