"I was 10 years old and I didn’t listen to rock ‘n’ roll. I was at a friend’s house and we were playing Warhammer, because I’m cool, and his older brother had an Iron Maiden poster and I thought it was very cool. It grabbed me and I didn’t realise it was for a band. I mentioned it to my parents and about a week later my dad brought me a copy of Killers on cassette from the Our Price at Waterloo Station. I can still remember hearing the opening track. It was like a switch flipping in my head. It was immediately apparent that this was my thing. Rock ‘n’ roll arrived very suddenly and forcefully in my life. One of the things I love about Maiden still, is that they are resolutely impervious to fashion. They’re just Maiden, they have always been Maiden and they don’t give a f*** You can take a lot of my records away from me, but I’ve got a lot of collector’s edition boxsets of Maiden and I would fight for them harder than most things in my possession. One of the things I love about Maiden still is that they are resolutely impervious to fashion. They’re just Maiden, they have always been Maiden and they don’t give a fuck. There’s something punk about that. They weren’t cool in 1980, they weren’t cool in 1990, they weren’t cool in 2000 and they weren’t cool in 2010, but they still go about what they do selling out arenas all over the world."

"When I was in eighth grade I ran for a student body secretary, or something like that, and all the kids would campaign for a month or so before the elections, putting up posters or whatever. And then on the election day everybody had to give a speech, or have some sort of audio presentation that got played over the school's PA. So there were periods on election day when everyone would be in the home room and you'd have to sit through all these speeches that the 13/14-year-olds were making. And I made my speech using the Deee-Lite tape. I had a double cassette boom box and I would dub different parts of the Deee-Lite tape and mix it up so that it built a speech. I didn't keep it. I feel like it must be in the possession of some member of my family, in a box somewhere. I'd kind of forgotten about that until recently but it turned up in my head recently. Unfortunately I don't really know anyone from that period in my life anymore so there wasn't anybody I could ask about it. I never really put it together that long, long before I had any knowledge of what dance music was, or what sampling or dubbing was I did this thing. But it certainly wasn't cool. I think it confused pretty much everybody in my school. I don't even remember what it said, but I remember feeling very proud of it even though everyone thought I was totally weird and a freak."