“What’s great [about Monster] is that we all have different favourites, all four of us. My favourite is Wall of Sound.

“Going back to the first few records, we were forced to work that way because there wasn’t time, we had to get together in hotel rooms and toss around songs and riffs. Paul in particular started to have the credit for being there more hours than anybody else and for having the focus of reminding everybody and himself that this is what we all decided to do, let’s do an uncompromising record. Let’s be who we are.

“When you’re eating bad food, you know that it’s bad for you. A year later when you’ve got those extra pounds, and heaven knows I’ve succumbed to that, you know what’s good for you, what’s good for you is to keep it raw and lean. But that’s harder to do, it’s self control.

"When you get in the studio it’s like being on a diet inside of a bakery. You’ve got all this technology and all the time in the world. You can bring in symphony orchestras and saxophones and glockenspiels, because you’re not in front of people.

"We would never dare bring a guy with a saxophone out on stage. It’s not who we are. The hardest thing to so was to go in the studio and say, ‘F*** all of that fancy French cooking, let’s just have meat and two veg.’”