"Elvis Presley is like the Big Bang of rock'n'roll. "What you had in Elvis Presley is a very interesting moment because, really, to be pretentious about it for a minute, you had two cultures colliding there. You had a kind of white, European culture and an African culture coming together - the rhythm, okay, of black music and the melody chord progressions of white music - just all came together in that kind of spastic dance of his. That was the moment. That's really it.

"Out of all that came The Beatles and The Stones, but you can't underestimate what happened. It does get back to Elvis."