“The first Slipknot album changed the game. I would only have been about seven when it came out, so the first time I heard them was Duality from Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses). That made me go to Virgin Megastore and buy the self-titled album, and that was it. Hearing this was such a change to what I was used to hearing, which was Nickelback. And then seeing the aesthetics, the masks, the boilersuits, seeing how they would act onstage, it made me go, ‘I want to be [drummer] Joey Jordison. I want to join a band. I want to do all this stuff.’
“I loved their image and the whole aesthetic, giving themselves numbers instead of names and stuff. I remember watching an interview with Clown [percussionist Shawn Crahan] where he was talking about how he had set the idea for an image before the band started. It was basically: ‘You need to be Slipknot every minute of the day. You walk into the venue, you’re Slipknot.’ He wanted them to have that aura of, ‘Oh shit, Slipknot are here…’ It’s not a character that gets switched on. I think that's fucking awesome. It's something I really wanted to do with Graphic Nature, but it didn't go the way I wanted to. You can't wear windbreakers all day in the summer. Doesn't work.
“I thought they all had really cool masks. Paul Gray’s pig one was sick, Sid’s [Wilson, DJ] gas mask is sick. My favourite was Joey’s. The thing that I really liked about it was it was so human that it looked creepy. It was just a pale face and he'd have the black lines around the eyes. And it didn’t change much, which was also what I liked about Mick’s [Thomson, guitar] – it was a simple idea that looked amazing, and it hasn’t really changed since the beginning.