I like African and avant-garde music, anything that's vaguely interesting. Hard rock I get a bit bored with because it's what I do. So anything outside of hard rock's fine by me.

I'm old enough to know what music was like before rock & roll.

I came back from Japanese tour a broken man to find that one of my outside productions was very high in the charts and that was Nazareth. I stepped into another career and suddenly became a well-known producer.

It's really an orchestral piece featuring a group and it was quite revolutionary at the time and it in fact, it kicked Deep Purple off as a name in Great Britain because it made all the newspapers. Everyone was writing about us. And there was some confusion as to what kind of band we were after that, which is why Deep Purple in Rock is such a hard unbending album of really furious hard heavy rock. Heavy metal hadn't been invented at that point.

I don't listen to hard rock or heavy metal. I suppose I've always been influenced by folk music, I'm a big Bob Dylan fan.

If you listen to what's on the pop charts, everything is machine oriented.

You can't play bass in a vacuum.