"They were a fantastic live band and I saw them loads of times. Watching the way Alex was onstage taught me to let things flow and not be so tight-arsed. He improvised a lot. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band had a sense of threat – this feeling that he was a gangster, a bit of a hard guy, a bit shifty. There was a sense of menace in their stage performance, with Zal Cleminson dressed as this wacky clown, which was unnerving. We went through a phase like that – Paul used to get made up, half his face white and half black – when we did a lot of theatrics and a lot of that comes from Alex Harvey. I used to nail Steve Dawson’s DMs to the stage and he’d lean forward because he was nailed to the floor at the back."

"When I was 10, I was in my own world. Getting a digital radio in my room was a really big thing for me. This tiny little speaker. It was really liberating, like there was something happening in my room at all times. I was obsessed with radio and knew everything that was going on. I’d listen to the Top 40 countdown every week, and there was this band Queen that kept coming up. I loved “Another One Bites the Dust.” A friend of mine told me that song was about war and killing people, and, again there was something about the evil and the fear of it that appealed to me. I remember the DJ saying, “This is No. 1 on the black charts.” So I thought Queen was black. Years later, I saw their record cover—and realized they weren’t black"