"I’d be hard pressed to choose from those early records, but 1999 was a big departure from the first three and that double album was a massive undertaking. Those records where you don’t know how the hell the writer did the thing are the ones that will always have a massive mystique and weight with me. Probably the casual fan of my bass playing or the rhythm section of Guns wouldn’t be able to pick up on it, but me and Steven really worked on this groove by playing along to Prince as well as Sly and the Family Stone. We would sit in the rehearsal room and crank the music on this ghetto blaster and just play along and emulate some of that stuff. It was ‘85 and no-one knew what was going to be next, there was a big question mark. Punk was sort of in its death throes, there was this – if you ask me – really bad metal that didn’t relate to anybody, then the rest of it was up to us, people who were our age 19, 20, 21, whatever and we knew it. So we tried to go a different route and that 1999 record was a big influence on me becoming a bass player."

"This is where I came in with Queen — somehow I missed the first two albums. Our bass player always looks at me like I’ve got three heads when I say, “no, I never saw Seven Seas Of Rhye on Top of the Pops. I must have been out playing football that particular week. But when I first heard Killer Queen I thought, “wow, this is different. You could tell they were rock band, but you could also tell they were much more than a rock band. It had elements of vaudeville, which is fantastic to be able to bring on board, and when I heard the album there was even more things, like Bring Back That Leroy Brown, but at the same time you had things like Brighton Rock hammering away but with Freddie Mercury sing away in this weird falsetto that sounded like Sparks. It’s an amazing record. Now I’m Here is still one of the best rock songs ever written. It was very varied, very Queen in the sense of setting a standard that they then had to follow. It wasn’t like an AC/DC record where you get 10 songs that are very similar. This could have been four different bands on one record, with four different personalities making the music."