"That’s my plane movie. Like, I’ve got it stored on my phone, and if I absolutely just need to just be on a plane, I’ll just put on Apocalypse Now. The mania and craziness that Colonel Kurtz is supposed to represent, and what the jungle in Cambodia is supposed to represent — knowing, by watching documentaries and reading about it, that that mania was not only present, it was prominent on set as they filmed this. Just all of that together. The movie itself is incredible, but the knowing of the making of the film, and what happened when they were making that film, knowing all of that just makes it a much more comprehensive experience. When Colonel Kurtz talks about the horror, and you know what horror he’s talking about, you just feel like you are let in. You’re gifted an audience into true craziness. Every single character in that movie is bats–t insane, and it’s just a matter of how forward it is. So I mean, even Robert Duvall saying, “There’s nothing like the smell of napalm in the morning,” and then taking a pause from it and going, “You know, one day this war is going to be over.” You can just feel how sad he is about that, and how crazy that is. And then you move on to the othercharacters, and then when they get to that farthest checkpoint where the bridge keeps getting knocked down, and he’s like, “Who’s in charge?” And the guy’s like, “S–t man, aren’t you?” No one knows what’s going on here. What does he say to the guy, Roach, the guy with the grenade launcher? “Do you know who’s in charge here, son?” And he just looks at him and he goes, “Yeah,” and then turns around and walks away. That’s when you know. You know who’s in charge? Craziness. The only thing that is in charge here is chaos. You can feel it, and I love it. And Lance, who’s tripping on acid, who’s standing on top of the bunker screaming, looking out, where Charlie is screaming back at him like, “F–k you, GI,” and he’s like, “Lance, get the f–k down!” But that’s the thing: Lance is all of us. That’s what I feel about that movie. He first gets up and he’s just like the good old surfer dude who’s just there and serving his thing, doing what he has to, and in the presence of all of that craziness, he is so affected by it. He’s like the frog slowly boiled in water. To the end, where you get there and he’s ready, he’s primed for the gospel of Kurtz, and he’s just there, and that would be all of us. That’s the experience that so many people had in that war."

"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."

"The Blue Nile was another sort of national treasure that I was drawn to and then thrilled to discover they were local. I can't overestimate what it meant to fall in love with bands from Scotland who enjoyed success. It just opened up windows for our minds, because there's a certain particularly being a 70s baby and London just felt so far away – success of any kind, or glamour, felt far away. Whenever a Scottish band would succeed on a national level it felt really immense. 

 What I also just loved about The Blue Nile was how evocative and sad they sounded. I loved the sorrow in their records, because up until hearing them, I'd hadn't really heard sorrow. I'd heard non-conformity, I'd heard rebelliousness with Siouxsie and the Banshees or The Clash, but I'd not heard sorrow. 

 Depression and sadness have always been a part of my language and my family all sort of thought or considered me a complete freak as a result. They just thought this whole darkness and my gloominess was an annoyance and at best, an irritant. But to me it's always been part of my interfacing with the world. Sorrow, sadness and depression – it's just existed in me and it's part of, I think, human nature. 

 When I heard Blue Nile, I was like, 'Ah, old friend, I recognise you, there you are. Somebody else feels the same as me'. I loved the sort of expansiveness of their sound. It felt very sort of like a modern Frank Sinatra to me, in a way. It's an obvious comparison but the sweeping, Nelson Riddle-esque type of sonic landscapes just really captured my imagination. 
 
 Paul Buchanan's got this ache in his voice that's, again, very unusual. You don't really hear a lot of people sound like Paul. I loved the sort of ordinariness of the lyrics too – it was very much sort of relatable, simple, and unglamorous expressions of love; I just really identified with that. 

 Pop music has always just alienated me for one reason or another – I just don't identify with it or understand it. So somebody like Paul Buchanan and the Blue Nile literally speaks my language. It's a language that isn't often used or utilised in day-to-day culture. I think we're all encouraged to hide our mental health issues, or encouraged to hide our depression, our sadness and our griefs. I believe in the expression of grief: I think it's imperative for a joyful life, and why live if you can't live joyfully? 

 To live joyfully one must express negative emotions. It's really, really important. And those people who shirk from so-called negative expression, I think, are cutting off an entire part of their own happiness and existence."