“For us it was Alice in Wonderland. Four knuckleheads off the streets of New York who didn’t have a clue what was going on or that they were about to scale the heights of Mount Olympus. Or that one would become the actual God of Thunder, you’re damn right I am.

“There was this spectacular innocence in the band, Ace and Peter were healthy, happy and couldn’t believe their luck. You find the Genie lamp, the Genie Simmons lamp of course, you rub it and out comes the Genie and says, ‘Whatever you’d like, you can have it.’ You say, ‘I like to be a rockstar with more fame and whatever than you could imagine.’ And you get it.

“We were hard task masters on ourselves. Everybody was equally important in the band and there was an us against the world feeling because everything we did, people laughed at. ‘You have a song called ‘Strutter’? What the f*** is that? What about love and broken hearts?’ We’d say, ‘F*** that!’ Black Diamond is about a prostitute, they’d say, ‘Sing something romantic’, that just isn’t cool.”