"That first album, that sounds great to me. The first one we heard was ‘Heartbreak Hotel', because I don't think they ever released the Sun records - the RCA records came out first. We had a great friendship - I met him in 1965 the first year I went to the States. He was doing a movie at Paramount Studios, and I was at Paramount to talk about a song for a movie and they said 'Elvis Presley is filming here today, and he heard that you're coming over, and he'd like to meet you.' Like to meet me? I tell you, I didn't even know he knew I existed. I had three singles out at the time: ‘It's Not Unusual', ‘What's New Pussycat?' and a ballad called ‘With These Hands', and he had the three of them. He was walking towards me singing ‘With These Hands' - [impersonates Elvis] 'with these hands'. And then he said, 'How do you sing like that?' And I said, 'It's your fault, you were partly to blame!' He said, 'Well, you know, I come from Mississippi, I was born there, I was brought up with this stuff. What's it like in Wales? Are there any black people there?' I said, 'Only when they come out of the coal mine! No, it's listening to American music on the radio - that's where I've got it from.' He couldn't believe that somebody could sing like me not being influenced first hand, like he was - the gospel thing, listening to gospel groups and blues clubs like that. He preferred a lot of the later things that he did. I said, 'That early stuff on Sun Records, man, I mean jeez'. He said, 'Ah, it was very primitive - we didn't have very good equipment and it's a lot better now."" And I said, 'But there's fire there', and he said 'I'm glad you think so."" But he didn't do them on stage. I said, 'You want to open with them, open with ‘Blue Suede Shoes'.' But no, he wouldn't do it. Then one time, on his own special, he starts to go into some ‘Whole Lotta Shakin'' and then he goes on into another, and he said, 'We could do this all night', so you could see he was really wanting to do it. But he wasn't thrilled with those early recordings, he thought he made better records later on.#"

"Well everything’s been said about it, hasn’t it? Again, it was around the same time as Bring It On. I went out to South Africa for a gap year to work on a school. It was just as I was starting to smoke weed, it was exciting, and there were no responsibilities in life. I remember we didn’t have a music system out there, we had no money and a mate of mine went and bought a cassette player, it was a single deck cassette player, with terrible tinny speakers, but I had copied a tape of OK Computer before leaving! I don’t think I played any other album for about a year, it was on permanent rotation. What I found so compelling about it was that you can’t hear a single thing this guy’s singing! He has this real slurred delivery with every song and it was just an assault on the brain in terms of the production and the instrumentation and it was all coming through this terrible little tape player in South Africa! I thought I’d figured out what I thought the lyrics were and, largely, a lot of them were wrong, but I didn’t have the inlay card so I didn’t know! I just remember this haze of completely falling in love with the sound of this record and what I thought were the words. They really summed up the way a lot of people felt at the time, the alienation and the fear of a quickly changing world, all the pre-millennium stuff. It summed up the world that I occupied. It’s why it’s still the greatest album that I think has been put out in my lifetime; they're a band who, at that point, reached their songwriting peak, and [Thom Yorke]’s never got there since as far as I’m concerned. They were still young enough to have that punky quality but old enough to have those ballads that leave you feeling quite cold like 'Lucky' and 'No Surprises'. At that time, we were all just desperate to be Radiohead, everyone had the same set-ups and the same guitars! I can’t listen to it anymore though - as a band, if you’re influenced too much by one thing, as we were, it can kind of stifle you."

"Another great live record. Once I started playing the guitar, Judas Priest was one of those bands that went immediately into my playlist, although back then there were obviously no playlists, as we know them now. It was just a case of what vinyl you had. The band that I was in prior to Metallica, a band called Panic, had a guy called Dave Harmon playing in it. He was a huge Judas Priest fan and while we were trying to get that first Panic formation together, he and I would jam 'Victim Of Changes' over and over again. To me it was the heaviest thing I'd heard in my life up to that point. I think we all have our own idea of what a great twin guitar attack is. I always loved K. K. Downing. I haven't seen Priest with this new cat that's in the band, but the key to the dual guitar is how the two interrelate. In Thin Lizzy, for example, the riffs were a little happy. In Iron Maiden they were somewhere in the middle. But with Priest they were a lot darker and I always gravitated towards that. Regarding the rumours that the record was heavily overdubbed, I never heard that and frankly I don't care. We have had to fix some live performances and whenever you say that people automatically assume that you did it because your performance wasn't good or that you want to fake a really great performance. But sometimes stuff just happens. For example, we did a live broadcast of a show in Mesa, Arizona during the Cryptic Writings era. They went ahead and released a live show and I had not heard it. They said: ""Just trust us."" I had never let anything go out unapproved up until that point and the one time I did it, I noticed that one of the kick drums was turned off. And also David Ellefson's background vocals were completely missing. I thought: ""I will never let this happen again."" Sometimes you get into the studio and hear that things are wrong, like a microphone is inverted and it sounds like it was recorded in a fishbowl. But are you going to shitcan all the audio and video just for that? No, you fix it. But if you're going in there and replacing stuff because you play like shit live, then that's different."

"I ended up with this record because it was at that point in my teenage years when I was swapping records with my mates at school. We were all a long-haired, Afghan coat-wearing gang into Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and all those classic rock guitar bands. And Santana were almost amongst that; even when you go to albums like Abraxas and the early albums, they have a quite exotic kind of quality about them, so when Welcome came out, it was really rejected by the gang. It was like, ""Whoah! They've gone too far! What is this nonsense? We don't understand it!"" I got someone else's copy of it and I really started to sink into it. There are so many signposts in this record to the jazz world that has sustained me through the years. The first time I heard the words ""John Coltrane"" was through this record. Alice Coltrane is on the first track, which is this version of Dvořák's 'Going Home', which is adapted from his New World Symphony. It's like a classical piece played on a Mellotron. It's very dramatic and it's got nothing to do with rock music and more to do with that spiritual jazz that Alice Coltrane was knocking about. At that point, you couldn't give Alice Coltrane records away, and it's interesting that they didn't really gain currency until the late 90s. And then you've got people like Leon Thomas on the record, the guy who did the yodeling on Pharoah Sanders' records, which would lead you to his records. And John McLaughlin is on there, which would then lead you to The Mahavishnu Orchestra. Back then, you'd find these names on records and then when you were in the record shop, you'd find these names again and it all connected up like dot-to-dots. The concept of ""fusion"" throws up so many bad images because there's a load of shit there, but there's also so much good stuff as well. With this album, I opened the door expecting that rock guitar thing, but the sound of this record is fascinating: it has so much air in it and you can hear the sound of the room being pushed around. To me, this record is like audio sunshine and it transports me to some transcendental place."