In the days when Glastonbury was an alternative festival, it was quite interesting. Now it is the most bourgeois thing on the planet ... we'll leave the middle classes to do Glastonbury and the rest of the great unwashed will decamp to Knebworth and drink a lot of beer and have fun.

Life on the road can get a little one-dimensional. I didn't want to reach 40 and have to say all I'd done was look out the window of a tour bus and get drunk.

Anybody auditions for X-Factor it's because they want to be famous, not because they are artists.

Some of Eminem's rap songs kind of have the teenage love songs like the fifties love songs. It's kind of like domestic drama set to music. He is really good storyteller.

In my teenage years I was put off the idea of a career in flying, because I'd convinced myself that you had to be a boffin with degrees in maths and physics, which were my weakest subjects.

My son is in a band, and he’s a singer, and his vocals … they’re screaming-growling stuff … and he’s got a pretty reasonable voice. Yet he practices really hard to get the screaming-growling thing without losing that voice every five minutes. So I’m, like, “Hats off to you.”

We're better than Metallica. We're better musicians, better players. Put it this way, they can try to walk onstage after an Iron Maiden show if they want.