YOU WILL NEVER GET INTO THE TOURING TIME ZONE
"The first conversation you have every day when you get into the van to go to the airport or the gig is like a self-diagnostic check. Everyone says, 'How did you sleep last night'?' and it's always, 'I'm trying to get on the schedule,' or, 'I was up until 7am and woke at 4pm.' As much as you want to assimilate and get on the schedule, there's nothing you can do. I spend all my spare time on tour on YouTube watching bullshit, like interviews with bands that broke up 30 years ago!"

YOU'RE NOT GREAT UNTIL YOU GET ON A STAGE
"You might think you're a genius when you're sitting in your basement tearing up fucking [flamboyant Swedish guitar hero] Yngwie Malmsteen solos, but get up and stand in front of 40,000 people and see what happens. That makes you really start to self-inspect and figure out how you can be better. So, even when you're a 13-year-old kid, you walk away from playing live like, 'I suck!' I think the best bands are the ones that have gone out and done it for years and years, because they've figured out how to do it live."

YOU'VE GOT TO DO THE WORK
"I was watching a Lemmy interview the other day, and he was talking about being on the road and [how] being a working band is part of being a band. You're not a band if you just show up for a photoshoot and do a tour every once in a while. You have to get on the road and fucking do it, and as a working band, getting out and playing doesn't seem like work. Most of the bands that are in Kerrang!, I'm sure they've been in bands for years and slogged it out at festivals and are hitting the road hard. They're all learning experiences, and it all makes you a better musician."

WANT TO DO SOMETHING? DIY!
"Some of the first shows I played were in community centres. When I was 16, if my band wanted to play a gig, I'd have to rent out the hall, I'd have to rent the PA, get the security, make the flyers, book the bands, and just fucking hope that people showed up! If they did, and it was enough to pay the security guy, the PA guy and the community centre, and no toilet got broken, you'd walk away successful!"

KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE
"When Nirvana started being able to pick who we toured with, we would get bands like the Melvins or Boredoms bands that we really loved. Not only because they were friends, but because we wanted people to see how fucking great they were. We knew we could open those doors to an audience that might otherwise have never heard them. It's the same thing with the Foos, whether it's taking out The Struts, Biffy Clyro, a million bands. We want people to see them because they're great!"

WANT TO BE AWESOME? GET A QUEEN DVD
"Queen at Live Aid is one of the most historic moments in music. I've watched it a thousand times. Live Aid was U2 and Simple Minds and whoever else was there, and then Queen. I think Queen might have been the underdogs, because people thought, 'Oh yeah, it's just Queen.' So what did they do? They went out and played seven of their biggest songs - they opened with Bohemian Rhapsody, and within 30 seconds Freddie Mercury had that entire place in the palm of his fucking hand, just like that."

BE CONFIDENT
"There's a level of confidence that's important when you play live. Most people get some sort of stage fright, but when I was in Queens Of The Stone Age [around 2002's Songs For The Deaf], just walking onstage, we felt like a fucking brigade. It sounds terrible, but we fucking knew that you were about to see something that you ain't gonna see anywhere else. We were fearless, and I honestly feel like there wasn't anything we couldn't fucking do."

GET A MUSICAL SOULMATE
"When Josh Homme and I play, it's like a conversation between two old friends that have had too much to drink. That's what it's like when we write together - he'll send me a riff and send it back to him. I mean we get together and do that in a room, not on email. He'll play something and I'll hit it back to him like that [snaps fingers]. When we were doing Songs For The Deaf, we would sit there, laughing at each other hysterically, saying, 'This is fucking amazing.' "