"My second favorite film is probably even more intellectually challenging than Wong Kar-Wai; it’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I f***ing love that movie! I have two children; I’ve probably seen this movie, with each child, about 50 times each. And that’s no exaggeration. There’s nothing I don’t know about this movie. I once went to a meeting with an executive in Hollywood, and they asked me what I wanted to do. I said, ‘I’d love to do a remake of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang‘ — I was just making it up — ‘and I’d call it Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Boom,’ and he said that’s a great title! [Laughs] I was only kidding. But that’s a movie I really love. In the UK at Christmastime, the girls would get The Sound of Music and the boys would get Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It was that kind of thing, where every Christmas you would see it. So when I had kids, of course I put it on for my son and then he became obsessed with it. It’s the kind of movie where you never really get to the end; it’s so long, and the kids can only really wait so long. But the beginning of the film is like 20 minutes long, before anything even happens. It’s just the story of the car. It’s fantastic!"

"You can't fail today to be mesmerised by 'Whole Lotta Love'. That was the song that did it for me. A lot of these choices that I've made are either the first or second release from these bands. I always thought that those were great times, because there was never any pressure around artists. You don't have all of the extras that come with being successful. The band is in a very pure place at that point. I always remember playing with them, but it was quite a while after this album came out. We'd just completed a very, very long and gruelling American tour. We were about to fly back to the UK and we had a call from Robert Plant saying, ""I heard you guys are still over in the States, would you like to come and hang out and open for Zeppelin on the Green ['Day On the Green' concert] in Oakland?"" So we got a really cheap, unglamorous motel by the side of the freeway. It was so poor that the walls were basically green, covered with algae. We were there for a week and just waiting and waiting and waiting for the chance to open up for Zeppelin. That was a very important show for Priest, because that was what broke us on the west coast of America."

"This was the great danger of me picking these records - that they'd all come from 1974, but that was when I was most enthusiastic about buying records. And Marquee Moon… I just played it over and over and over again. I just love it. US punk was very different [to UK punk]; over here, the concept of it was absolutely fantastic, and that was the whole thing that got me into it, but it was a bit one dimensional. The Ramones were great, but they were kind of a caricature - a cartoon band. And a lot of punk over here seemed to go for that, as a backlash against over sophistication. I just felt that Marquee Moon and the stuff from New York was odd, and it was different, and it was weird - and I always liked weird thing. It still had a lot of energy; I liked Marquee Moon in preference to, say, Patti Smith's Horses… it was just contrived enough. Any further and it would be too pretentious. It's still great today; as soon as I put it on and hear those first few bars of 'See No Evil', it reminds me of when it first came out and I played it non-stop. Although imagine my disappointment when I bought Adventure on the red vinyl and tried desperately to like 'Foxhole', and it didn't happen."