Greg Phillips, Journalist

"We played in the middle of the race track and we had to stop the set a couple of times for the horses to run around. It was a very down-home affair but we’ve never done anything this serious."

"The biggest shock to me with the first album was just how massive a project it is to do a record."

His voice is incredibly croaky... Clearly, he shouldn’t be up there tonight. Rundgren blames the cold weather and three gigs in a row for his vocal malfunction.

“That was actually a really difficult record because when you work with live drums and live bass, it is easy to marry electric guitar with those elements."

"It fucked me up. I thought, I don’t want my kids to ever find me like that. I love you mum (looks to the sky), all is forgiven. It maybe saved everybody’s life. It was the point where I went, that’s it... stubbed out the cigarette, put the beer away and never went back.”

“I always have that Aussie rock thing in the background because that is what I grew up with."

“When I was six, I said to my mum, as I was strumming away to Elvis, I am going to America.”

"We used a medium that the majority of people understood. It wasn’t a million miles away from what you normally do. You hear a piece of music, you buy a record and it makes a difference to someone thousands of miles away.”

“I am an aggressive player and I wanted a guitar that bounced back at me and the Cole Clarks do that really, really well."

“We had this song called Fuck Winter, and we brought it in and it’s this real sort of boppy, upbeat number and a tinge of country but also it was a heavy rock song. It was really good, real summery and we were jamming it out and I think accidentally played the chord and it sounded cool and then Scott [Chapman – bass] played the wrong chord. Then we’re all playing the wrong thing until all of a sudden, we were playing this, dark heroin-dredgy thick piece of music, and we’re all just sitting on the A Minor chord looking at each other thinking, ‘This is fuckin’ bullshit!’ right? So I’m like, ‘Stop, stop, stop – lunchtime’. So everyone went to lunch and I sat in there and wrote a whole brand new song from that one little chord we were jamming on.”

I’ve built a Martin-style dreadnought, a disastrous 12-string, four lapsteels, a Weissenborn slide guitar, a square-neck dobro, a backpacking travel guitar and a 1920s-style 000-12 Martin copy. It’s taken me anywhere from 20 hours to 200 hours to build a guitar depending on how involved it is.

When I worked with Festival Records in Sydney, which was more corporate, they really went out of their way to pull the bass right out. They claimed it would distort on people’s radios. At the time we did Rum Drunk, which is on Nuggets, at Armstrong Studios, they used to have a three- or four-inch speaker mounted on a piece of cardboard and they would play the mix through that to see what it sounded like – the reason being that it was the kind of quality people would be listening to. It really was a piece of speaker mounted on a carton, corrugated cardboard.”