Skrillex and Maiden on the desert road

What music do you play in the desert? When you're driving through those wide empty spaces, where nobody else is around and there is just the glorious nothing everywhere, and you just need something loud to fill that void, what do you listen to?

Anything you want! Who cares?

So you bet your arse that I played music that would get me sneered at by all the cool people when I was barrelling down the Desert Road through the middle of the North Island recently. Nobody cares about Skrillex anymore, but dubstep will never die! And while Iron Maiden are clearly still a lot cooler, they are still raging dorks, and playing Rime of the Ancient Mariner at top volume is rarely acceptable in polite society.

Things are different out on the road, out in the nothing.

Thank goodness we had a Queens of the Stone Age album when we went though the American desert, because nothing sounds better in that slab of the world. We only had that and OK Computer for hundreds of miles, but even the most familiar Radiohead sounded new again in the desert sunset. The colours, man.

I did spend a lot of time in the Mongolian desert listening to Last Christmas on the tour driver's one cassette tape, and I figures that gives me a pass on playing Whamageddon for the rest of the century.

The desert doesn't care about you. If you disrespect it, it will chew you up and spit you out. But you can also throw all the terrible - and great - music into it, and it will eat it all up. Go hard.