I was born in 1963. So the '70s were my teenage years. As a teenager, I was into rock and roll - Bowie, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, even more progressive music like Genesis, and I was into a lot of British rock and roll. But I loved also American rock and roll. CCR, Jimmie Hendrix, The Doors, Patty Smith, and Bob Dylan.
I have two sons, and at 16, they were into Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, and a lot of British rock.
My first synthesizer was the VCS3. I got it in Bristol in the late Sixties, long before Pink Floyd used them. I had to sell an acoustic guitar and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder to raise the money. You can do fantastic things with modern computers, but you cannot use them in the same intuitive, spontaneous way you can a VCS3.
The reason I got into music was obviously because of bands like The Beatles and Pink Floyd, things like that.
You'd have to be daft as a brush to say you didn't like Pink Floyd.
As teenagers, we used to listen to entire Rush albums, entire Pink Floyd albums and shut down the lights and it was great.
I've always employed a melodic style with my leads, placing strong emphasis on infusing romantic sensibilities into what I'm trying to say. Those big, epic melodies come from influences like Pink Floyd, Journey, Marillion... bands that have these guitar parts that are just soaring!
Where I lived, on Long Island, you had the radio stations that always played Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and AC/DC and all that. I grew up on all that stuff.
Well, I love Pink Floyd, so I wouldn't be offended by it. I only intentionally robbed them three or four times.
When I get 13 or 14 years old, I get crazy with rock music, like, like, deeply crazy. And one of my favorite bands at that moment was, for example, like - bands like Metallica or Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd and Santana, you know? And then I start to play metal, actually, when I was - at the age of 15.
