"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."

"In terms of pushing my playing and songwriting, and the re-acquaintance of David Ellefson and myself, and with Kiko being such an un-fucking-believable guitar player, I would have to pick Dystopia at this point. But now Dirk Verbeuren’s in the band, I’m really looking forward to what’s next. When we get into the rehearsal room, warming up for the shows, and we hear Dirk playing some blastbeats, I’m questioning what Megadeth is going to sound like when we make the next record and we have those skull-numbing beats going on, it’s gonna push my playing to otherworldly limits. I’m excited because I can do the fast metal stuff, but having the chops and musical depth that Kiko has and with Ellefson holding down the fort, I’m really looking forward to the next record. I started thinking about it the day we left the studio after making Dystopia. That’s just how I’m wired."

"I got into them through this album. The rest of the guys had never heard of them. We went to Sheffield University to see them – I took the band; I said they had to see this great groove – and there were about 100 people in there. It was a very eventful night with punks and rock fans together, because I think UK Subs were supporting. I loved the style they had – the repetitive riffs and rolling bass, which was more bluesy than metal. They were very aggressive – Bon Scott had massive presence on stage and he could sing and wrote great lyrics. And the rest of the band loved them as well, and it really affected us – without AC/DC, we wouldn’t have written ‘Wheels Of Steel’. We toured America with them in 1980, when they were doing Back in Black, on Brian Johnson’s first tour. They were really friendly guys - they had a bar backstage so you could get a pint while they were playing"