"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."

"So he started off as an indie guy. 'Loser' was just a song he released on an indie label, but it caught fire. MTV picked it, blah blah blah. And it was later put on a proper album on Geffen. He is an eclectic artist and a Scientologist to boot. The irony is that Beck's father [David Campbell] actually arranged the symphony orchestra that backed us up at the Melbourne stadium when we played there. Mellow Gold has got this eclectic sense to it in terms of, like, he uses drum loops, which I hate, but it sounds cool to me! He uses different kinds of instruments and seems to play them all, and the songwriting is all over the place. But at the core of it, what he doesn't do that other singers do is show off. He just gets the personality going and sings the song. So when you think of Brian Johnson and Robert Plant and Paul Rodgers, they're showing off with their vocals, singing way up on the high end of their range. I don't care if it's Steven Tyler or anybody else, you show off! Beck doesn't show off. He's just midrange or low-down. His attitude comes not from what he does vocally but it's laid back, kind of matter-of-fact, as if he's just thinking to himself. It's a unique thing. In that way, even though it doesn't have a wall of guitars or any of that, it's very rock. That sensibility he's got, although I'm sure he would consider himself an indie artist, but his sensibility is very rock."