"I always regretted that the Spiders didn't do that one as a single, Bowie and the Spiders. Because when he had written it, we did hear it and we did a version of it just to try it out, and you could hear that there was a real potential for it to be a big hit single. And we didn't treat it like that, we just treated it as another song we needed to get a version down on record. Then he gave it to Mott The Hoople and it went absolutely huge! It turned out to be kind of like an anthem of the 1970s, really. An amazing song, another one of my favorites. It was one of those songs you hear, and you just know immediately: that's a hit. Some you might hear and think it could be a hit if it was treated right, or it could be a minor hit, but with that one it was: no, this is a major hit. He wrote it for Mott The Hoople, really, they were on the edge of splitting up and it wasn't going well, and they needed to be pulled out of it with a hit – so David, as he did, just went: 'Okay, I'll write one.'"

"I think [Barry Lyndon is] the ultimate movie for men. I think it’s a classic story of how you go through life, and also, for me, it’s Kubrick’s most emotional film. I know everyone accused him of being very cold, but the last movement of that movie is, I think, piercing and just beautifully told. There’s kind of this inevitability of incident that starts happening at about an hour before Barry Lyndon ends. It’s breathtaking in terms of the narrative control along with the visual control of that movie. Even though it’s very different from the [William Makepeace] Thackeray novel it’s based on — the Thackeray book is actually funnier and kinda faster, [while] Kubrick makes it a little more glacial and stately — but it still is a phenomenally beautiful movie made at the height of the great American studio era. It’s really a pinnacle of 1970s American moviemaking. And I think Ryan O’Neal was incredibly poignant in that film. And the music? The sensory experience of seeing Barry Lyndon, you can’t really make those movies anymore. It’s not even in our DNA anymore. I don’t think the sensibility even exists to build movies like Barry Lyndon. And that’s just a huge loss."