"If you listen to the first Saxon album, you can hear where the band was at that time, and what we were talking about earlier, with Free and Yes. That album is split three ways: the songs we wrote together that were fast and aggressive; then the more proggy tracks, longer and more musical; then blues riffs. So if you listen that album you can see there were three things that could have happened - we could have been like Free or like Yes, or we could play a new, aggressive kind of music, singing about motorcycles, and those were the songs we wrote together. If you listen to that album you could see where our influences came from, and how it all came together to create ‘Wheels Of Steel’. If you listen to ‘Backs To The Wall’, that is where I was coming from – try to get away from where you're supposed to be and drag yourself out of that to become a musician. ‘Stallions of the Highway’ is maybe the forerunner of ‘Motorcycle Man’ and the songs that Metallica and Megadeth took from and then invented a new kind of music"

"For the four years between 1971 and 1975 one could say that Robert Altman didn’t touch the ground. I am strangely less sensitive to his previous work, including M*A*S*H, and what followed (too baroque for my taste), but Thieves Like Us, California Split, The Long Goodbye and McCabe & Mrs. Miller are the great successes of a cinema free of all constraints and carried by the best of the spirit of their time. It is hard to believe today that these films were actually financed by a studio and were even popular successes. Nashville is the culmination of this rather miraculous cycle. And even its transcendence – being a sort of “total-film” – its timelessness grasps the American spirit in a way that few films have. One feels at times it veers toward caricature that is a little cynical – Geraldine Chaplin, a very young Jeff Goldblum – which gives a glimpse of what will follow it; but for the most part, the film is in a state of grace, at once funny, cruel, profound and always seeking human and social truths – with a scalpel."