"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."

"I’ve always loved Del. He was my first hero when I was young. When 'Runaway’ came out I was only 13 or 14. I had to have my own rock star. Well, they weren’t called ‘rock stars’ then – they were all pop stars. But my sisters had had Elvis – and I loved Elvis of course – but you had to have your own hero, you know? So Del Shannon was my one. But there’s a great story about Del and ‘Runaway’. He’d made the record and he was on the road and someone had sent him a copy of the record and he put it on his record player, played it and went, ""what the fuck?!"" It was semitone faster than it should have been! And he phones up his manager and he says, ""what the hell have you done to my record?"" And the manager said, ""oh, we sped it up because we thought it was too slow."" And that’s how it is to this day. It’s in B flat minor instead of A minor. Which is amazing and it sounds better when it’s sped up. I’ve slowed it back down to see what it sounded like when it was originally done and it doesn’t sound as good as the sped-up version. You can tell that his vibrato is really fast and you can tell it’s sped up."

"Phil Lynott. Genius. And a bass player as well. Have you noticed that most of the music normally comes from guitarists? But he was the driving force in this band. He was a skinny black guy, who was writing great songs and dealing with the consequences of racism in the UK at that time. He was always the main attraction to me. A real rock star and you'd feel that whenever he walked into a room. You can instantly recognise Phil's voice, and he had a really cool way of creating melody on songs like 'Jailbreak'. This album is distinctly Irish, and I'm not sure why I think that to be honest but it definitely makes it special. At the time they were about as unique as they could be. And it was quite successful in the charts, which, along with seeing bands like them on Top Of The Pops, was another important factor. After Phil died and Thin Lizzy came back a few years ago we took them out on tour but that's partly because the songs have held together so well even to this day. It was a real joy to do that and to be able to hear those songs played every night, and played so well. And to be honest I think that's enough, because the songs are really what matter. They're still playing together, but I think they're called Black Star Riders now. The last record was very good, but nothing compared to this."

"Sister Lovers is one of the most beautiful records. It's probably the record I've listened to more than any other. It's just a damaged and fractured, beautiful, plaintive, poetic record. And it still retains its sense of mystery. When we first went to Memphis we met Jim Dickinson [producer] and I asked him loads of questions on how he recorded Sister Lovers. We actually went to the studios where they recorded the album twice. We were absolutely obsessed by that record. Dickinson told stories about the recording process and allowing Alex Chilton to be himself. There's no one like them in the rock canon. There's a lot of pain in the record, a howl, anguish and pain. It's the sound of defeat. But there's also a duality of victory and defeat too, which is really rare in music but it makes it so appealing and attractive. Alex Chilton could go from The Box Tops to Big Star – the first two albums were pop rock, Byrds-y commercial songs. Then, he made Sister Lovers, which was like an art record. Pure art. There's nothing commercial about it. No one would release it. It was recorded in '74 to '75 and was released in 1978, after punk. This was because he was ahead of his time. It's only in the last 15 to 20 years that people have picked up on Sister Lovers. A record like no other."

"Take great care with this documentary film of an all-day concert staged by John Phillips in small-town Monterey, California, for it holds within it the greatest single performance by any electric-music instrumentalist you have ever seen, or are likely to: the U.S. debut of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Known as the man who revolutionized the electric guitar, Jimi Hendrix appears onstage in this film a man possessed. As David Bowie sang in “Ziggy Stardust”: “He could lick ’em by smiling/ He could leave ’em to hang/ They came on so loaded, man/ Well hung and snow-white tan/ . . . He was the nazz/ With God-given ass/ He took it all too far/ But boy could he play guitar.” Never will you see a performance so sensual. There are many great films to be found of Jimi playing, but none to rival this. In Monterey Pop, there are many performances worth watching, seminal, even—Janis Joplin, Otis Redding among them—but they are all just warm-up acts to Jimi, the greatest rock-and-roll star to ever tread the boards."