"You feel from the first moments that this movie will make no mistakes. I remember those claustrophobic rented rooms and the host family always laughing and cooking and playing mah-jongg. Compositions are boxed in on the left and right, which ups the energy of each scene, igniting these characters because they’re given so little space. Wong Kar-wai designs this past world meticulously, then casts it with messy realness and makes it turn . . . Messy realness saves his two leads. Maggie Cheung Man-yuk and Tony Leung Chiu-wai float on air. They are as gorgeously put together as any two humans out there, and here give a clinic on the power of performance restraint. Cinematographer Chris Doyle adores Cheung: captured by his slow motion, her beauty is written into the record books. This is a love story that crawls. Every breath taken by these two characters is counted. You’ve got to get into the masochistic pleasure of dying for something to happen that may not. What does happen? Torrential downpours soaking 1960s Hong Kong, Nat King Cole haunting the background of an incredible score, and a parade of the most gorgeous dresses ever zipped up the back of an actress."

"I lived a stone's throw from Penny Lane, and my sister had Beatles wallpaper, my brother had a plastic Beatles wig and Beatles cap, and they were older than me, and my auntie Kathleen - who was a bit of a ... swinging sixties... a Liver bird, put it that way - came to live with us and she brought with her Sgt. Pepper's. She would go and see concerts like Gene Pitney at the Liverpool Empire and things like that. She was quite an interesting woman - to me anyway - and was great fun. I had one of those portable record players like you did in the 1960s, and I would play this over and over again while staring at the Peter Blake/Jann Howarth record sleeve, which made a 3D collage, and asking people ""who's this?"" and ""who is this?"". I've said it before, it was a bit like Dorothy opening the door of the house once it's arrived in Munchkinland, and everything goes technicolour from the black and white-ness of 1960s Liverpool. It was like a portal into things like the Hollywood musicals that I'd been seeing on the Saturday morning at the pictures. My auntie Kath would say, ""Ooh I saw The Beatles in the Liverpool passport office getting a passport while I was getting mine"" and my mum would go, ""I knew Julia when she used to look like Lucille Ball and she used to strut down the street"", and so it was Beatles saturation, living in that particular part of town. 'She's Leaving Home' on that album was the first song that made me cry, which I think is quite an important moment in your life, when a piece of music makes you cry. It was just the sadness of the story of a girl leaving home. Then of course there was 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds', 'A Day In The Life' and all those odd string arrangements. There was also the Magical Mystery Tour double EP in gatefold technicolour glory and things like that. It was like an entry into a world that was distant yet very close as well. It made me want to learn the lyrics to sing along and I guess it was just very important to me in my journey of music appreciation. And if you had the measles or chicken pox, you were quarantined to my sister's bedroom, and it was like a TARDIS of 'John Paul George Ringo' and it would drive you absolutely insane, as it was all you could read: 'John Paul George Ringo John Paul George Ringo John Paul George Ringo' and their smiling happy faces. It was kind of great and yet torturous at the same time. Pop torture."

"It's got the charm of a debut album and he is someone who has inspired me a great deal. I suppose he was taking time off the avant-garde of New York in this album but I like the idea that he was 27 or something and he had already been in the Velvet Underground, which was unlikely for anyone from Garnant in any case - he was making a pop album for a major label in LA and driving around in sports cars and things! Overall, it's not his most experimental or brutal record but the songs are charming and it's still really influential. You can hear 'Sound & Vision' by Bowie is a complete lift from 'Cleo' on this album, it's obviously a record that seeped into people's collections so a music fan like Bowie would have been aware of this album. It's a really interesting pop record and I think as a musician still working, he offers quite an inspirational path as to how you can still experiment. The Super Furries collaborated with him for the film Beautiful Mistake - we got to be his backing band. It was so interesting, it was like an out of body experience for us. I think it was interesting for him as he hadn't had band practice in the Welsh language since the early-1960s or something!"