Quotes from Oliver Sykes

I think EDM and metal and rock have been together already for a long time. Bands like Nine Inch Nails, Linkin Park, the Prodigy - they all have influences from both.

Once you've been painted as something it's very hard, especially when you're young, to wash that off.

I was extremely unpopular at school. Once the hardest kid in school beat me up and there was a plan for about 30 other kids to kick me in the face once I was down. Good times!

We can get rid of all the plastic bags and plastic straws in the world - and we need to - but nothing is going to get better until we can make the people at the top see that there are changes to be made.

I write the lyrics based on what is going on in my life - I'm not going to write about the old hair metal stuff, like castles and stuff.

Arctic Monkeys are actually one of my favourite bands going, which is really weird cos I went to school and college with them.

Artists can be the most powerful people in the world because they can use their voice for good. Politicians should be the most powerful people in the world but they aren't going to do anything.

The only way I'll really smile is if you cut me ear to ear.

Every girl is beautiful, it's society that's ugly.

We need to be our own heroes. We need a new way of looking at things. Greta Thunberg has shown us that. It's crazy, but this kid has proven that we can be our own leaders.

Everything I'd taught myself about screaming is basically a big no-no for singing. Your posture, your airflow - you're just pushing all the air out. When you start out, you're fast, heavy and loud but you're hiding behind it in a way. When you stop screaming, that's when it gets hard.

What puts people off metal is they think it's all nutters and blood. We don't want to be seen that way.

The guitar shouldn't be a main instrument, it should be a texture. It shouldn't be important whether it's there or not. If it's important to you whether a guitar is there or not, you're weird.

I was trying to prove people wrong who said I wasn't a good guy, and I was trying to be the person that other people thought I was - people who loved our band thought I was a god.

When I was 17, death metal and extreme hardcore was the best music in the world to me. But as I got older, my palette changed and my thirst for melody and emotion just got bigger and bigger.

We try so hard to block out negative or dark thoughts, but sometimes embracing your demons is the most vitalizing thing you can do.

Go back in time. Next question go and look at dinosaurs. I would be sitting on a rock looking at a T- Rex, loving life.

You can compromise on anything else in your life but love. It's the one time where under no circumstances should you let yourself have second rate.

I found myself reading about this 16-year-old kid inventing a micro-organism to save the ocean. It made me realise that we can do anything if we put our minds to it. Even with all the damage and destruction, things can heal if we let them.

Some people lose a whole world to grief sometimes, while others just don't grieve. Sometimes we're just too scared to face our emotions.

I must have been about 13 when I first heard Linkin Park and, to be honest, music had never played that much of a part in my life to that point.

To be honest, I don't really like arenas. It's not easy to make the sound good, or to perform in them.

It's quite an easy way to write a concept album about love. Everything boils down to love in the end.

I just love to sit and go, 'Let's just write a song and not worry about how it needs to be'.