"I remember when I was in high school someone signed my yearbook - this guy Guy Blakeslee who's now in the band The Entrance - amazing guitarist and he told me how to play the A minor chord. He signed my yearbook, "Hey hey, my my, rock and roll will never die", and I remember thinking, oh my god this guy's a genius, and then I found out it was the genius Neil Young. A genius steal. He probably thought I should have known it, but anyway I think I got the album after I found that out and it became one of those albums that feel like they're your own secret album. My mum listened to Harvest a lot so I knew the 'Heart Of Gold' era, which I also love. Rust Never Sleeps became my personal Neil Young treasure. It has such a raw sound, I guess because it was recorded live. I didn't even know there were overdubs on it. Actually a lot of the albums I chose were those live albums that are what is live, what isn't live?. But on one song on the musical we were stuck on the opening and I went back to Rust Never Sleeps and pretty much ripped off the song 'Thrasher' - the opening to that song. That was 'Fathers And Brothers' - it's just a stupid little simple [thing], we were just going for something really simple and I remember we worked on it all night, trying to get this arpeggiated thing working and we just went for the straight strum in the end, and the engineer/mixer guy came back and said, "Thank god you you went for the simple thing". 'Powderfinger', 'Pocahontas', they're all great. Young is somehow able to pull off these songs all about the plight of American man that would just seem so cheesy nowadays, but I think there was this experimentation with subject matter in 70s songwriting that was kind of innocent and is not really done today. I enjoy the storytelling of Neil Young, the simplicity of it all, and just that voice [that] can sing just about anything and make it sound good."

"That must have been high school. A video played before MTV was around [on Top Of The Pops], it was 'Bang A Gong (Get It On)', Elton John played on it and really it was another song. It wasn't 'Bang A Gong' and there was this moment where Marc Bolan jumped and it wasn't even on time, and I think, "That's fucking cool! Goddamn it, how cool is this?" Such a wiseass thing to do. Either that or I guess they wanted to play the album version and they probably didn't make a video at that time and they just slathered that on. His guitar has a kind of bluesy effect, obviously his lyrics and vocal style I like - [imitates Bolan] - and I just thought this was a cool, cool record. I feel cool when I listen to it - I feel like the coolest guy in the world, just as cool as shit! Bolan took the blues and made it a lot more palatable. I love blues music, but after a while it's like, "Aw man, here we go again!" That would be like water dripping on my head if I listened to that all day. I appreciate it, goddamn it, I do, but in small doses. The A minor pentatonic - one thing I learned from the blues is get the fuck away from that pentatonic scale! I played with Link Wray one time - I played one song with him, I forgot! - and his thing to me was: "Joey, I don't want to hear any pentatonics there", and I just went out, I didn't even practice, thinking, "I'll just wing it!" I went out there and got so nervous, I threw in a pentatonic scale! I hope he didn't hear me! And he went, "Come on Joe!" He wanted me to put my leg on the monitor, total rock star, and I was thinking, "I won't do this! Please don't make me do this!" And I did it! I just felt like a douchebag. And funnily enough, we were playing at the House Of Blues."

"""Whole Lotta Shakin'', was the first time I heard him, in Pontypridd, being played from Freddy Fey's record shop. People used to ask me, because I loved music so much, 'What do you think of this record, what do you think of that record?' When Elvis Presley came out, I said he can't be the only one - a white man being influenced by black music in the South. So when 'Whole Lotta Shakin'' came out, my friends said, 'Is that what you're talking about?' I said, 'That's exactly what I'm talking about!' Another guy, playing piano, similar to what Elvis was doing, but even more syncopated, white and from the South. It was unbelievable to hear that record. Then 'Great Balls Of Fire' followed, and 'High School Confidential' was a great record. When you listen to his records, he always sings up, except towards when he got older and the pressures of life got on him. In the beginning, he was always up, you know the ends of everything came up. Little Richard was pushing the shit out of everything but Jerry Lee, he had his syncopation, it was like he floated. He fell out of favour, because he married his cousin - it was a shame, he was still making great records. There's one called 'Loving Up A Storm' and that's equally good. That's on The Sun Years, they're all there. I saw him live in Cardiff in 1962, and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates were there and they were slick... I thought, 'Shit, how's Jerry Lee going to get over this?', because they closed the first half. He came on, and instead of how Johnny Kidd and the Pirates were very aggressive, Jerry Lee was the opposite, he opened up with 'Move On Down The Line' and the band were like [sings] and he just walked on and was like [gestures] showing us the the chord he was going to play. He just sat down at the piano and - boom - went into it. It was like 'Jesus Christ!' You know, it was smooth, it was slick, it was rock & roll but he wasn't like, screaming - he had a different take on it and yet it was rocking."""