"Me and Stevie have a really good relationship. He’s just a music making machine, he doesn’t stop. Anything he does is good. He’s got the magic ears. He’s the line from Elvis and Roy Orbison and The Beatles to the present day. His musical pedigree is the best. His dad was the bassist for Roy Orbison and he grew up with Jim Reeves around. He grew up as the son of the most badass bass player who was playing with all the big hitters. He has the most solid-roots rock pedigree, and he’s an appreciator of music. Him and his dad disagreed about stuff because the British Invasion hadn’t really hit Nashville. They thought British people were weird, funny people. Stevie was beyond that. Not only was he into The Beatles, he was into The Mothers of Invention. The freakiest most degenerate shit ever. Stevie appreciates really freaky shit. With his sounds and development and process of recording, you get a real glimpse into a different era, that’s the magic with him."

"I associate this album with a specific moment in my life. We never had a TV until I was about 16, so we would only hear about stuff like The Simpsons and Neighbours from friends. They seemed exotic and distant. But this one time I did see an episode of Neighbours in which one of the main characters got hit by a car, and it really fucked me up! I'd never seen anything like it before. And so, as I was driving home, my mum had Sgt. Pepper's on in the car and I was listening to 'A Day In The Life', and I was looking at a certain spot in the road, and I heard the line, which goes ""he blew his mind out in a car"", and it all suddenly came together. I imagined a car crash and I imagined this spot on the road and I imagined what I'd just seen with this song. And I think that is the first time that I genuinely understood the concept of death. I was probably only about five. That's the thing about The Beatles, you can get it into you from zero up. I never forgot that feeling of being petrified and understanding death for the first time. And the music did that to me. It wasn't Neighbours or the road, it was the fact that somehow that song had transported me and helped me to understand a real emotion. He [Lennon] had been dead about five years at that point. Children love The Beatles, and they love Queen, because there is something about those bands that is so colourful and fun and they create such a world. And the Sgt. Pepper's world is so easy to visualise, you can literally hear the crowd and the characters and the colours, the carnival air. It's all just magical. I've always enjoyed the fact that my band doesn't sound the same from song to song, and I think we get that from The Beatles. The Beatles were every type of band for ten years, and then they were nothing, which is probably why they are the most famous band in the world."

"I used to think there were records you couldn’t improve on – The Beatles, The Move, Motown. But there was always records I thought needed improvement – the drums shouldn’t do this, they should do that. I had ideas above my station from a very young age. Me and my friend Desmond had a band around 1970 – we used to listen to ‘Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out’. I was the lead singer and played kazoo."