"For me, this is the best guitar fuzz sound on record; it’s absolutely brilliant. I’ve been trying to get that sound and I’ve never got close, I’ve no idea what it is, apparently The Music Machine made their own pedals. They’re well-known to people who are into garage, psych-y stuff and I discovered them via Nuggets or Rubble compilation, or something like that. It’s strange, I love that song - I’m not hugely keen on the vocal but it doesn’t really matter to me on this song, it suits its purpose. It’s like the opposite of The Zombies’ Colin Blunstone’s voice. It’s not sweet and melodic, it’s gritty and punky and not my usual sort of thing but it screams attitude to me. It’s the sleaziest thing I’ve ever heard and it’s very, very inspiring for production. It’s the whole groove of it, the whole thing, but it all comes back to that guitar fuzz sound. With bands like The Beatles there’s so many books that go into the recording techniques, but not so with The Music Machine. Personally, I’ve learnt that the problem with fuzz tones is that, for example, people say you can get the fuzz sound from The Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ by buying a Maestro Fuzz-Tone pedal, but I’ve seen countless demo’s of them and it sounds nothing like it, because it all depends on all the elements, like whether the guitar went straight into the board or if it was played through a broken speaker, or any number of things. There’s no way of knowing for sure. Maybe it’s because it was the ‘60s. Things weren’t documented but I still do it now, I get a sound and I won’t make notes on it because it’s like, “Why would I sit there and make notes on exactly what I did?”, so it becomes kind of lost and when people ask, “How did you get that sound?”, I don’t remember. Maybe it’s something that’s meant to happen - almost like you’re not meant to know, for ‘Trouble’ maybe it was the sound of the leather gloves they wore. The Music Machine had a very strange look, I think the singer wore a single leather glove and the rest of them wore roll necks and medallions."

"A little like David Bowie and his influence, with me being a teenager during the 70s meant I never stopped being affected by Brian's music. If you were a big Brian fan, you would get into a cast of characters - be it T. Rex or Roxy Music or Bowie - and you followed the connections of those artists. Eno managed to stay really intriguing. When Eno's first album - Here Come The Warm Jets - came out, it was a record you only had if you were in the know. It was obscure and underground but I had never gotten into it. I had a couple of friends who were Roxy freaks and bought everything and anything to do with the band and I had a best mate who was obsessed with Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and was playing it all the time. I got to know it really well and it has connected to a lot of records that I like. Arguably, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) was the blueprint for Wire. It was the blueprint for David Bowie's later records and you can hear the proto-Talking Heads on that record. People forget that Eno was omnipresent in the late 70s on collaborations with Bowie, Talking Heads and Devo. If you listen to Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) that makes complete sense. It sounds like all of those bands four or five years before they made similar stuff. 'The True Wheel' sounds like something off Scary Monsters and it is four or five years before. 'Third Uncle' sounds like Talking Heads many years before - so make of that what you will. The idea of using the studio as an instrument, which has become commonplace now with people in their rooms on GarageBand, was a real innovation when Eno was doing it. There was no one else like him at the time. But, it is all about the listening experience and, like the Wire album, when I heard Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and listened to it a lot, it was everything rock music hadn't been up until then. I was making note of that - it was anti-blues, it was anti-rock and it was anti-faux authenticity. It was a long, long way away from Laurel Canyon."

"Bands have their anthems, you know, 'You Shook Me All Night Long', all that for AC/DC sure. For Those About To Rock is the call to arms, it's the definitive anthemic album. Back In Black probably had better songs, but the band started to have a sense of itself because a band stands or should stand for something, like when you have a country you have a flag for that country. But when a flag stands for something, it takes on a meaning of its own, and then people realise that the flag doesn't just represent the country, but it represents what the country stands for. The platform - in our case, platform boots. So, For Those About To Rock We Salute You is what AC/DC is all about. The graphics and that cannon and the title - and it's why they always end their set with it - it's anthemic. 'You Shook Me All Night Long' is probably the best song they've written in my estimation, but it's not an anthem. It's because the lyrics aren't on that same level. They aren't big and bold. 'For Those About To Rock (We Salute You)' means something, it's a connection. It's like nationhood. Put your fist up in the air and say, 'Yeah! This is what I believe in!' 'You Shook Me' doesn't have that, it's just a rockin' great song. When the band realises its own meaning, when a band can see itself clearly, that's when it connects. It happened to us on Destroyer. That album cover had no guitars on it, no drums, no guitars, no stage, nothing. That's when we understood that we were bigger than the music we played. But you don't see that until someone points that out to you. When you start to see your face in parades and on walls and on tattoos and all that. And when you see that there just aren't any guitars or drums in there. People are attracted to the personas. The personas are bigger than the guitars. Whereas, it's hard to have an image of AC/DC without a guitar. Without a guitar, you would say, 'Who's that?' The same goes for Metallica or almost anybody. They're musicians. We are iconic images. That's fine for me. That's bigger. That's part of pop culture."

"The thing about that record is that it had an honesty that rock & roll had been missing. The 80s were a terrible time when guitars didn't sound like guitars and there were drum machines, but then all of a sudden here comes this group, Guns N' Roses who plug in their guitars and just didn't mess around with any fancy stuff. And the songs were undeniable! 'Welcome To The Jungle' is an undeniable song in the same way that 'Satisfaction' has that great riff with the lyrics on top of it. Great lyrics, great imagery, and as soon as you heard that high-pitched voice that harkened back to a Robert Plant-ish approach to singing, which hadn't been heard in quite a while… Well, it still works today. That's got to be coming up to 30 years old, but you put that on today if it was a brand new band, I would say, 'Who's that?' That intro is almost symphonic, and it just defined the band. You hear that song, and then the rest of the album follows through. 'Welcome To The Jungle' is head, hands and feet above the other material. Bands have a few songs that just stand up, you know? You think Thin Lizzy, you think 'The Boys Are Back In Town'. You think the Stones, you think 'Satisfaction'. You think Led Zeppelin, you think 'Stairway To Heaven'. There are just certain songs that, either because of the melody or lyric or the sound of the song, intrinsically say, ""This is what that is"". The only band who doesn't have that thing, just because they have so many god damn good songs, is The Beatles. I don't know if [us influencing them] is the case. We never paid attention to anything. There can be scenes or not and people can be influenced or not, but at the end of the day you are left to your own devices. When you think about it, The Beatles were influenced by Motown, The Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, etc. but then when you hear The Beatles, it's their own stuff. It's like cooks. Everybody uses salt, everybody uses vegetables, there is nothing unique, but how you mix up those elements makes it yours or not. If you can grab a style, I think it has to do with talent. Everybody cooks, but few people are cooks."

"I wasn’t really a punk. I was about 16 when that album came out. But I was living above Maples, a carpet shop near Tottenham Court Road, and it was right by Capital Radio, and I remember suddenly these 14-foot letters appeared in spraypaint on Capital‘s windows, ‘THE CLASH’! And there was a thing in Melody Maker, where I heard about this club called The Roxy at Covent Garden, so I went down there. Me and my friends already looked a bit skinhead-y, suedehead-y, and I had this mohair suit, but the connection was that the punks had straight trousers in this world of flares and Kevin Keegan hairdos. Nobody was wearing Vivienne Westwood clothing: there was a guy in a dinner jacket painted pink, and someone else in a boiler suit they’d made themselves, and it was really DIY. The tribalism between mods and skinheads and punks hadn’t really started at that time, and it hadn‘t fractured into a million pieces yet. In 1977, if you had short hair, and you were prepared to have someone call you a fucking cunt in your ear for it, you were in. I saw a band called Eater at the Roxy, whose average age I later found out was 14. And I first heard The Clash’s ‘1977’ and ‘White Riot’ on record there. I felt like I was at the advent of something new. I liked punk, and I liked the attitude, but by 1978 we had our own thing going. But I always had a soft spot for The Clash, because they had the reggae thing, like us, and there was a bit of soul in their music, for want of a better word. Joe Strummer definitely had a bit of soul in his voice. Every fucking track on that album’s brilliant, but my favourite’s ‘London’s Burning’. And they were fucking brilliant live. And we [2 Tone bands] wouldn’t have had anywhere to play if it wasn’t for punk. You had pub rock informing punk, and punk informing us, and The Specials were a direct amalgam of punk and ska, and we realised that the faster we played, the more likely we could get the crowd jumping up and down, which was a legacy of punk. All these different movements, fracturing then coming back together. You’d need 60,000 sociologists to untangle those couple of years."

"Again, with Blur it was hard to pick just one. I really love how this song starts, I like that guitar part, the scratching chuggy thing and then the way it explodes into this Beatles-y chorus. "I think Graham Coxon might be my favourite guitarist ever. It's that same thing: he's always offsetting Damon Albarn's beautiful melodies with really freaky, strange discordant guitar lines. I think they like different music, right? I remember Graham Coxon loved My Bloody Valentine, really droney guitar music like that and Damon Albarn is more poppy, and that combination together sounds so cool. You can always hear Graham under all Blur's songs, just making it all so much cooler. “I wasn't really caught up in the Britpop war, I grew up hearing it come through my older brother and sister's bedroom walls really. They used to play Blur and Oasis and Pulp, there was no distinction. There was no war going on in our house. We just loved all of it! “I feel bad but I haven't listened to Blur's most recent album. I need to listen to more new music but I'm pretty lazy about it. I love songs that I know and you know that feeling when you can sing along to a song that you love? You can't do that with new music or you have to get to know it first. It's just laziness! I always find listening to other people's music inspiring and I'm always like ""ooh I wanna write a song that's like this!"" And quite often that'll be a spark into something else entirely, but I don't wake up in the morning and put on an album in the way I imagine a lot of people do. I listen to music in the van a lot, that's where I listen to music the most. “I'll see new bands at festivals or Soph is really on top of new music. In the van it's normally Spotify, we have a playlist that we play all the time but there's no new music on it, its pure 80s’ and 90s’ sentimental classics. It's called FM FM! It was created and started by our wonderful ex-tour manager. We all love Magic FM, so it was meant to be the whole of their playlist made without adverts. It's so long that you could listen to it for days and not hear the same song twice."

"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."