"They famously reformed last year and I've seen them a couple of times and played on the same bill with them. One of my great regrets was that I came to this album a couple of years after it came out and my friends had all been to the show when they came through town and I missed it. It felt like a concert I should have been at. Part of it was that I hated guitar bands. In high school I was into terrible progressive rock like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes, while all my friends were into Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth. I always thought I was in the right and it was them who was barking up the wrong tree, which subsequently has made me a little bit embarrassed, because it was the 90s - I should've been listening to Sonic Youth. But I was firmly committed against guitar music and it was the same friends, like Ryan [Smith] - who's in my band now playing guitar and keyboards and other stuff, and who's been my friend since I was 11 or 12 - who was the guy in the Dinosaur Jr. T-shirt trying to get me to play organ chords in the background for his band, and I was grumbling away, ""When the fuck do I get my solo?"" And he introduced me to Neutral Milk Hotel. It's kind of an obvious way in for me, because it very much has that sound - the spiritual free jazz and the horns and the power and the instruments from around the world, different bagpipe kind of instruments - for me, it has that same spirit and wildness. It's also one of those albums, like the Pharoah Sanders, where the songs are all essentially the same song. And I don't mean that to diminish the achievement of this record because I think it's amazing, but when you have a record where you listen to the first song and the melody is so elemental to me - it's like it existed before this album was written - and then later on you hear another song and it's the same melody but inverted. Not in a technical sense, but you get the impression that these songs all come from the same tree and I love that. That's one of the things that the album format can do - tie things together like that. I've done that myself consciously on my records in the past - reprised a melody. On Our Love there are two songs that are essentially the same song revisited - 'All I Ever Need' and 'Your Love Will Set You Free'. Not the melody, but the underlying riff and the harmony."

"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."