"They famously reformed last year and I've seen them a couple of times and played on the same bill with them. One of my great regrets was that I came to this album a couple of years after it came out and my friends had all been to the show when they came through town and I missed it. It felt like a concert I should have been at. Part of it was that I hated guitar bands. In high school I was into terrible progressive rock like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes, while all my friends were into Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth. I always thought I was in the right and it was them who was barking up the wrong tree, which subsequently has made me a little bit embarrassed, because it was the 90s - I should've been listening to Sonic Youth. But I was firmly committed against guitar music and it was the same friends, like Ryan [Smith] - who's in my band now playing guitar and keyboards and other stuff, and who's been my friend since I was 11 or 12 - who was the guy in the Dinosaur Jr. T-shirt trying to get me to play organ chords in the background for his band, and I was grumbling away, ""When the fuck do I get my solo?"" And he introduced me to Neutral Milk Hotel. It's kind of an obvious way in for me, because it very much has that sound - the spiritual free jazz and the horns and the power and the instruments from around the world, different bagpipe kind of instruments - for me, it has that same spirit and wildness. It's also one of those albums, like the Pharoah Sanders, where the songs are all essentially the same song. And I don't mean that to diminish the achievement of this record because I think it's amazing, but when you have a record where you listen to the first song and the melody is so elemental to me - it's like it existed before this album was written - and then later on you hear another song and it's the same melody but inverted. Not in a technical sense, but you get the impression that these songs all come from the same tree and I love that. That's one of the things that the album format can do - tie things together like that. I've done that myself consciously on my records in the past - reprised a melody. On Our Love there are two songs that are essentially the same song revisited - 'All I Ever Need' and 'Your Love Will Set You Free'. Not the melody, but the underlying riff and the harmony."

"I was a little sceptical at first, because he's so young. The term 'blues' has come to be quite different than what I know as blues in a traditional sense. I've been tagged as this blues-rock guitar player and on more than a tolerable number of occasions I've been accosted by people who say, ""You must listen to this new young guy! A blues player, you won't believe it!"" And usually, no, I don't. 

Quinn Sullivan seems to have what it takes. The 'blues' seems to be rediscovered about every ten years but in this case I think it's well done. It's certainly encouraging. Interpreting the blues in an appealing manner is not so different than attempting to speak a recently-learned foreign language. You can memorise the instruction book but it's the dialect that allows you to enter the society as a true speaker of the language."

"It was kind of weird because I had forgotten how much I listened to that album. I was introduced to Ronnie [James Dio] at an early stage, loved his voice and Ritchie [Blackmore], as a guitar player, was someone who was just beyond the grasp of my little mind at the time. He was so unique. When you go through all the different eras and songs, there's such variety. Songs like 'Kill The King' were interesting, but by far my favourite was 'Gates Of Babylon'. It has such a hypnotic, dancing gypsy riff. The singing and all the production is just tremendous and if you can copy Blackmore and master what he's doing, it'll take your playing to a whole new level. Not many people have done it either. Yngwie [Malmsteen] did it very well of course, but Yngwie is the master and was influenced by not just Ritchie."

"This was the first album I ever owned. A friend of mine was a member of one of those music clubs where they'd send a certain number of albums. He had two copies of this. This isn't the best T Rex record, but it's stitched into my DNA. Over the years we've covered 'Twentieth Century Boy'. We tried to steal 'Get It On' with 'Armageddon It' – tried to get that swagger at the beginning. Bolan was just relentless from 1970 to 1974. You can lose perspective of how important he really was. On our covers LP a few years back, Vivian (Campbell, guitar) mimicked Bolan on the cover. Bolan was a huge influence on Vivian: the way he stands; the Les Paul, everything. Total rock star. We try to put across a proper show: and it all comes from watching Bolan on Top Of The Pops."

"Nobody can underestimate the world changing impact that The Beatles had on my generation. It was so powerful and revolutionary. It enabled us all to see the possibility of picking up a guitar and expressing ourselves in any way you wanted. And they were the pioneers of change and innovation. They were symbolic in the sense that we were all looking for something new and they provided it. When I heard Please Please Me, it was like it was from another world. This album represents the beginning, when they had been playing clubs and were first capturing that creative energy and raw vocals. This was the bare naked, early origin of many of these artists in this piece of music and I loved it. Of course, they went on to do many things after that, but this was the kernel, the seed of what they were to do later."

"One of my favourite albums. I love Gary Brooker, and I loved Robin Trower when he was playing cool stuff. I never followed him after he started trying to turn into Hendrix. I didn't get it. What's he doing this for? Hendrix has already done this. Procul Harum made great music that was related to the classics, but with crazy lyrics. I still don't know what half the lyrics are about: 'Repent Walpurgis' [from their debut album], I still don't know what that means. But it was intriguing to me. A Salty Dog is beautiful, and this reminds me of an era when keyboards didn't interfere with the guitar, just like Soft Machine. It's the kind of music that takes up where 'I Am The Walrus' takes off. And these were all great singers. The only ratty singer I liked was Roger Chapman out of Family."