"I kind of briefly threw The Shining out there, so that gets its own due, which means I can fall back on 2001, I suppose? I think that film speaks for itself, if I could explain that film to you, then I’d be… I don’t know what I’d be, one in ten who could explain it to you, but there was a followup called 2010 with Roy Scheider, which wasn’t a great film, but if it did anything, it helped explain 2001 a little bit, but 2001… I remember my father took me to see that in the theater, and that was so awe inspiring, and just to see where the imagination and creativity could go on screen as an 11-year-old kid, or however old I was. And to have seen that film over and over and over again and ask new questions every time I do, it’s been a pretty profound staple in my house for years. Then you get into all the conspiracy stuff. You attach the lunar landing — Kubrick shot the lunar landing stuff in it, and the rear screen projection that was used in the space scenes and in the ape scenes in the beginning, and how conspiracy theorists surmise that that’s what he used to shoot the moon landing. Did you hear all that? The theory is that NASA got a hold of the footage from 2001, saw it, and got Stanley Kubrick to shoot all the moon landing stuff in his studio and broadcast it across the country. Now, they’re not saying that we didn’t go to the moon, they’re saying that what the people in America saw was shot in a studio, because at that time we didn’t want to broadcast to the world what we may or may not have found on the moon — which actually makes more sense then it just being… It’s not, “We didn’t go.” We went. But we didn’t want the Russians to see, or we didn’t want Japan to see, or China to see what we’re discovering, you know? In case there’s anything there, or anything that we could weaponize, so Kubrick shot all this stuff in a sound stage, and that was the agreement. That’s why NASA gave Kubrick a super, super special space lens that he used for Barry Lyndon, because Barry Lyndon wasn’t shot with any lights. It was all natural light… candles, or sunlight, or whatever, so he used the lens, and that’s what allowed the light to get in for the film process, but there’s so many layers to the Kubrick stuff and I just, as a conspiracy theory fan, I like to have that in the back of my brain while I’m watching those films."

"I’d heard ‘Starman’ on the radio before going to school, and as most lads are, I was interested in football and outer space. Something about his voice and the opening line, just that thing he’d tapped into, and it was me he was suggesting to look out the window. It’s hard to comprehend the impact he had when he came out. I turned 13 in the May of ’72 and it was such a special time and gave my life magical class. I grew up in Norris Green, skint, and what he did was give the gift of inspiration. He changed the world in loads of ways and was probably the last great special person to do that. It was head and shoulders above anything else. To come out looking like that he could have had the biggest backlash. If you ever want to see star quality watch that Top Of The Pops clip, which is what gave me the idea that you need stage presence – you don’t just need it on stage, you need it in life. I missed those years of myself, in how naïve I was, and how un-laddy I was. I was into footy and stuff, but through the Bunnymen I found my own confidence. I was thinking of getting some bangles – thank God I didn’t. The thing about Bowie is that no-one else could have pulled it off. He was hardly ever on telly, and he never went on and mimed. It was just everything about it. People who missed it must’ve been stupid. I remember after Top Of The Pops going to school and asked my mates if they’d seen it and they said, “yeah – the fucking queer.” I didn’t even see that. I didn’t see it as a sexual thing, I wouldn’t have minded if I had have done. It made some sense because I was probably more androgynous than him through my teenage years – girls would ask me if I was a boy or a girl. I’d always tell them they could put their hands down me kecks and find out. When Bowie shaved his eyebrows off I knew something was up. That’s how you can pinpoint when Ziggy ends. His hair started to change and that’s when he stopped being so from-outer-space. I’m very exact on it, because it almost broke my heart. Without Bowie, obviously I’d have been centre-forward for Liverpool. It wouldn’t have been a bad career playing for Liverpool. I was a goal-hanging bastard. Fantastic shot, but I didn’t particularly like going into the 50-50s, the life-threateners. And my eyesight went to shite when I was 13."

"When I think about why I love Queen my head just fills with every single Queen song that I know by heart. It's just like a box of Quality Street. Everything is amazing. The reason that I've chosen the second album is because the song 'Ogre Battle' is on there, which is one of my favourite tracks. It's rare that you struggle to label a band. If you're a heavy metal band you're meant to look and sound like a heavy metal band but you can't really call Queen anything. They could be a pop band one day or the band that wrote 'Bicycle Race' the next and a full-blown metal band the next. In terms of the depth of the musical landscape that they covered, it was very similar to some extent to the Beatles. I mean 'Helter Skelter' was a pretty heavy track, and 'Yellow Submarine' really wasn't. I think Queen have a lot of similar ingredients. Everybody was writing the songs as well, so Freddie was writing differently to John Deacon, and then John was writing differently to Roger [Taylor, drummer]. They were all accepting each other though, and nobody was sat there saying that they couldn't do something because it didn't sound like Queen. If it was a good song they'd record it, and this album is nothing but good songs. It's a style that we've tried to adopt into Judas Priest. A good song is a good song at the end of the day, and there's no point in wasting time arguing about whether Priest are supposed to sound like the British Steel record or the Painkiller record or whatever. I felt such a sense of loss when Freddie died, but he fucking loved his life. He partied like a maniac. I've lost a lot of friends to AIDS and it's such a terrible thing to have to suffer through. Such a cruel condition to be taken by. From what I've seen and heard there's a horrible sense of loss in those early days. There was a lot of rejection and almost pariah-like status heaped upon you by people. And it's still around today, which is so sad and unfair. It's interesting though, because I don't know if Freddie would still have been doing what he did now. Would he still be going out on the road with Brian and Roger, who, by the way, I love? Especially Adam [Lambert]. But Freddie would have been 70-something I think, and I get a feeling that at some point, he would have just said, "I've had enough now darling." We lost him, but he left behind such an incredible legacy and canon of work. I listen to Queen almost every day still."