"Now the heaviness comes! It's up there with Sehnsucht by Rammstein: just pure molten lava, classic metal. Alice In Chains were such a weird band: losing their singer, when he had gangrene and was addicted, and they went and did a record with fucking Elton John… just a truly bizarre band! Jerry Cantrell was the guitarist, and Layne Staley was the singer who sadly passed away. If you look at old footage of Layne Staley, he really was one of the most doom-laden, foreboding metal presences you could ever wish to see. Look at old footage of him and he'll just stand there, stock still, with his glasses on and he always had his arms covered because there was always something bad going on with him, but his voice just came out of him like the eternal cracking of the oldest oak in the mythical forest. His voice was just wipeout, it was so low and had so much meaning. And Jerry Cantrell was such a pointed, furious, lumpen but spry guitarist, and there hasn't been a classic metal album for a long time I think. This is a bit of a shit muso point, but I think a lot of that is down to modern day metal musicians tuning down. They do this drop, this detuning where everything is just 'du-doom du-doom du-doom'. That's why you don't get this kind of music anymore, because all the guitars are tuned too low. But Jerry Cantrell obviously has a classicist's mind when it comes to metal, and the song 'Them Bones'... it's a simple rudimentary chord, but as soon as it comes on there's a spectral, dying scream in the background, four chords going up in semitones, and it's just like, "Fuck me… how do people find this erudition out of simplicity?" That's when rock & roll is at its best, when it finds that complexity in simplicity, and power in loss or whatever you want to call it."

"This record was 1958 and it was already a 25-year retrospective so that means it spans from 1932/3 to 1958! It came to me at the same time as all this new wave stuff and I was really interested in all the stuff Cage was doing with prepared piano, and there’s a bunch of prepared piano on my new record. Between those pieces and orchestral works for multiple players where Cage was using people banging on metal break drums and stuff, it was really sounding like the gamelan music I was listening to at the same time and I just found it to be super inventive. John Cage was defining a new way of thinking about music in the 20th century and in a way his definition included all of noise and all of ambient sound and all of these things that became movements for us in the 20th century, like Eno’s whole discreet music and ambient thing; or noise music from extreme harsh Japanese noise to whatever we called Neubaten or what Sonic Youth were doing, if you called that noise music; or the Boredoms or Merzbow which is more extreme, there’s no singing, there’s no guitars, it’s just harsh noise – this music opened the door for all that stuff. It’s amazing music in it’s own right, and yet some of it also explores really low volume like super quiet aspects of music where background sounds and people coughing – well that’s part of what you’re hearing in the experience too. So I felt like that record is so important that it defined a gargantuan giant of the 20th Century, which is John Cage, but it defined all these different bits of music that even if people later didn’t realise their music stemmed from that, in some way it did. Everything from 60s onwards, no matter what you were doing outside of rock & roll there was some kind of influence from Cage there."

"I remember when I was in high school someone signed my yearbook - this guy Guy Blakeslee who's now in the band The Entrance - amazing guitarist and he told me how to play the A minor chord. He signed my yearbook, "Hey hey, my my, rock and roll will never die", and I remember thinking, oh my god this guy's a genius, and then I found out it was the genius Neil Young. A genius steal. He probably thought I should have known it, but anyway I think I got the album after I found that out and it became one of those albums that feel like they're your own secret album. My mum listened to Harvest a lot so I knew the 'Heart Of Gold' era, which I also love. Rust Never Sleeps became my personal Neil Young treasure. It has such a raw sound, I guess because it was recorded live. I didn't even know there were overdubs on it. Actually a lot of the albums I chose were those live albums that are what is live, what isn't live?. But on one song on the musical we were stuck on the opening and I went back to Rust Never Sleeps and pretty much ripped off the song 'Thrasher' - the opening to that song. That was 'Fathers And Brothers' - it's just a stupid little simple [thing], we were just going for something really simple and I remember we worked on it all night, trying to get this arpeggiated thing working and we just went for the straight strum in the end, and the engineer/mixer guy came back and said, "Thank god you you went for the simple thing". 'Powderfinger', 'Pocahontas', they're all great. Young is somehow able to pull off these songs all about the plight of American man that would just seem so cheesy nowadays, but I think there was this experimentation with subject matter in 70s songwriting that was kind of innocent and is not really done today. I enjoy the storytelling of Neil Young, the simplicity of it all, and just that voice [that] can sing just about anything and make it sound good."

"""Whole Lotta Shakin'', was the first time I heard him, in Pontypridd, being played from Freddy Fey's record shop. People used to ask me, because I loved music so much, 'What do you think of this record, what do you think of that record?' When Elvis Presley came out, I said he can't be the only one - a white man being influenced by black music in the South. So when 'Whole Lotta Shakin'' came out, my friends said, 'Is that what you're talking about?' I said, 'That's exactly what I'm talking about!' Another guy, playing piano, similar to what Elvis was doing, but even more syncopated, white and from the South. It was unbelievable to hear that record. Then 'Great Balls Of Fire' followed, and 'High School Confidential' was a great record. When you listen to his records, he always sings up, except towards when he got older and the pressures of life got on him. In the beginning, he was always up, you know the ends of everything came up. Little Richard was pushing the shit out of everything but Jerry Lee, he had his syncopation, it was like he floated. He fell out of favour, because he married his cousin - it was a shame, he was still making great records. There's one called 'Loving Up A Storm' and that's equally good. That's on The Sun Years, they're all there. I saw him live in Cardiff in 1962, and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates were there and they were slick... I thought, 'Shit, how's Jerry Lee going to get over this?', because they closed the first half. He came on, and instead of how Johnny Kidd and the Pirates were very aggressive, Jerry Lee was the opposite, he opened up with 'Move On Down The Line' and the band were like [sings] and he just walked on and was like [gestures] showing us the the chord he was going to play. He just sat down at the piano and - boom - went into it. It was like 'Jesus Christ!' You know, it was smooth, it was slick, it was rock & roll but he wasn't like, screaming - he had a different take on it and yet it was rocking."""

"Yeah, my mum bought it for Christmas. I must've been 18 at the time or something. I find it quite cool that my mum actually went into a record shop and asked for Metal Box by Public Image! There were only a few thousand made, so it was limited edition. But I was a huge PiL fan, I loved the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten/Lydon and when the Pistols split, everybody was waiting to see what he's going to come back with. Nobody could believe that he would return with this. They sounded like nothing you'd heard before. The first track, 'Albatross', is basically listening to Lydon screaming that he wishes he would die for ten minutes, or a junkyard having a nervous breakdown! The album has these metallic smashes and clangs, which I'd never heard in music before. This is considered one of the first post-punk albums, alongside the Siouxsie and the Banshees record, but before Metal Box, it would probably have been Pere Ubu's first album. From a UK fan's perspective, Banshees and PiL would have made the first post-punk records. We'd bought 'Death Disco' on 12"" records, but to buy an album in a canister, cut and mastered really loudly, bursting out of my speakers was something strange. These were not rock & roll songs, they didn't have a lot of dynamic to them at times either. They were danceable though, with a disco drumbeat, a dub reggae bass, playing Swan Lake on guitar, with Lydon screaming about his mother having cancer over the top of it and ending up on Top Of The Pops. That's avant-garde being taken into the fuckin' mainstream. To me that's very revolutionary and subversive. It was a real howl from the soul. Every time I listen to Metal Box, I remember what it was like to live in Britain in the late '70s when I was a teenager. It was a grey, damp, repressive country and that record reflects the state and times perfectly. It was a snapshot of the times."

"When you inevitably are asked about your favourite record, you can scratch your head and go through a list, because your taste changes from year-to-year or through different periods of your life. However, I have always been able to say that Raw Power is my favourite from the moment I first heard it, and I don't think it has been equalled since. A couple of friends recommended it to me. At the age of 14, I was starting to play guitar in a certain way and the name [of Stooges' guitarist] James Williamson kept cropping up. A couple of guys I knew assumed I had been listening to Raw Power because of the way I was playing riffs. So I thought I had better investigate. I knew all about Iggy and The Stooges but I wasn't aware of Raw Power. I got the album in about 1976. I had heard so much about it that eventually I want into town to buy it and I picked up a copy for about three quid, which was all I had. The cover alone made me want to buy the record, and, when I heard it, I realised why my mates had been saying what they had. In particular, the song 'Gimme Danger' started off with a riff that was very much like one I was playing with the band I was in at the time. As a guitarist, James Williamson's playing struck me as having the technique of Jimmy Page but with the irreverence and attitude of Keith Richards. I have since become friends with James and have talked to him about what he was doing back then. He knew exactly what he was doing and it was very deliberate, which is always quite impressive. There is a lot more I could say about Raw Power. It gave me a path to follow as a guitar player. It was an opening into a world of rock & roll, sleaze, sexuality, drugs, violence and danger. That's a hard combination to beat."

"We played at the Freddie Mercury tribute at Wembley in 1992. The best part was doing 'All The Young Dudes' with Bowie and Mick Ronson and Brian May. That was the best three minutes – musically – of my career, from an emotional point of view. It was the last time Mick Ronson played on stage and it was celebrating the life of a phenomenal musician that we all miss to this day. Brian May is a career long friend of mine. I remember Phil Collen (guitar) was really nervous. I said to him: 'You're bloody doing it. You'll regret it you're entire life if you don't' I literally had to drag him on stage by the collar. We were looking across and there was Ronson and Bowie and May. And it's my glam anthem, you know? It's my funeral tune and there we were doing it with everyone who ever meant anything to me all on one stage. Bolan would have made it even better I suppose, but he was dead. But this record Ziggy Stardust? The way I see it is this: what other record could have influenced, say, me, Boy George and Morrissey in the same way, you know? We don't have much in common but we all saw that same thing…. we saw Bowie with his arm around Ronson on Top Of The Pops and it was like 'well, that's what I'm going to do for the rest of my life'. Seeing it on colour TV as well: it looked amazing. To see Slade; The Sweet; Bolan - all of them with the purples, greens, oranges, reds and silvers – it was bonkers. Even Gary Glitter covered in bloody Bacofoil. To come from black and white to that! Bowie oozed class. I got the Ziggy album when I was 12-years-old. You're full of shit at that age but you're also a sponge. And I was listening to things like 'Rock n Roll Suicide' and I'd think: 'I wonder if we really are all going to be over and done with by 1977'. It was a great story. [sings] 'Pushing through the market square…' Brilliant vocal delivery which was a) listenable b) commercial and c) totally accessible to anybody, from hardcore Bowie fans to little girls who were probably enamoured of David Cassidy. I was listening in awe. He had it all."