"Francesco Rosi’s great historical and political mosaic is a dramatic inquiry into the circumstances around the assassination of the Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano. On one level, it’s an extremely complex film: there’s no central protagonist (Giuliano himself is not a character but a figure around which the action pivots), and it shifts between time frames and points of view. But it’s also a picture made from the inside, from a profound and lasting love and understanding of Sicily and its people and the treachery and corruption they’ve had to endure. It’s a rigorous investigation (Rosi actually uncovered new facts about the case), but it’s never dry, it has blood flowing through its veins, and it’s shot in black and white that is absolutely electrifying (the cinematographer was Gianni Di Venanzo, who shot many of the greatest Italian pictures of the ’50s and ’60s, including Antonioni’s L‘eclisse and Fellini’s 8½). And Salvatore Giuliano is, among many other things, a grand hymn to Sicily, the land of my family, and for that reason alone I cherish it."

"I love that whole album, Coney Island Baby, I like the whole way that album was done. It’s got a cooler, very studio thing going on with all these ‘Oohs’ and ‘Ahh’s’ on the vocals all over the place. “With ‘Crazy Feeling’, I can’t be sure, but I think I heard it on the radio when it first came out. I think I was going to kindergarten somewhere; that was the ‘60s for me! I heard that ‘bum, bum, bum’, that sort of that chiming thing that goes on, and I really liked it and the sound of the guy’s voice singing. “At this point, it could’ve been a vivid dream that I’m remembering, but I think it actually was that song that I heard that on the radio and mixed in with everything else it caught my ear, at whatever age I was, whenever that song might’ve gotten a couple plays on a radio station. We would’ve been listening to a New York station at that time, living in Connecticut, or a Connecticut station"

"One of the best blue-eyed soul voices ever. Famously he didn't do drugs in the '60s and made up for it in the '70s. My girlfriend gave me a book about how he recorded each album, it's incredibly detailed. For this record, he got a studio together in New York and got a load of musicians together to make the record. At no point did he play any of the session players any vocals – they heard bits of music but they had no clear picture of what the actual song would be like. He had a total vision and he didn't want to deviate from that with anyone else's opinion. People talk about records that go from jazz to prog to psych to vaudeville in one track and that's Todd. A proper studio head who could write hooks and songs in an almost Brill Building way. My favourite story about Todd is that he lives in Hawaii and one side of his house doesn't have a wall. He said about it, "Lots of things come in. Animals, super-fans, stalkers, the weather."

"When I was 14 my family took a trip to London, which was the first and only trip we took together outside of the US. For some reason, we had to go to Waterloo station and my dad told me there was a song by the Kinks about people who meet there, then he played it for me when we got home. I associate it with this exotic feeling I had when I was there. At the time London seemed like a totally mystical place and lived up to my expectations of Englishness. I grew up in New Jersey, so mid-60s Kinks albums seemed like a pure fantasy world. The themes of this one are quite grown-up – it's wistful and sentimental. I also like 'Two Sisters', which is about a woman who is jealous of her carefree, single sister but realises that the stability she has in her family life is more valuable. That's such a different kind of song to listen to when you're 14, as opposed to the stuff on pop radio about love and sex."

"If you go back and listen to the early stuff they did, when they were The High Numbers, they weren't exactly a power band. [Pulls out phone again, shows photo of The Who playing a club in Chicago, presumably The Kinetic Playground, in August 1968] I had their singles, too. When I was still in high school I used to subscribe to Melody Maker and I got it by airmail - it was $105 in 1965. That was a lot of money. That's where I read about all this stuff. I'd see all the bands when they were playing clubs, which was the way to do it: you could really see how the bands worked. The sharp, 60s era of The Who is version I like best. A band I was in, The Grim Reapers, opened for The Who just before that photo was taken. They were just wild, the best live band I've ever seen. Hendrix was different: he was cool. Townshend was just exciting, even besides the smashing the guitars."

"I love Wes Anderson, and I can only compare his movies to other movies he’s made, because you can’t really compare them to other directors’ films. Obviously, Wes lives in a world that’s like his childhood, and he draws from a delicate, nerdy kind of etiquette-obsessed fairy-tale world in many different ways. There’s an elegance about what he does and an absurdity that’s almost otherworldly. His sensibility lies somewhere between the late ’50s and the late ’60s, with modern elements in there, but really it feels like an old storybook. So Fantastic Mr. Fox, I’m sure, is something he was dreaming of and you can really feel that. The casting was awesome—I love George Clooney, and I thought he was perfect for it. The pacing of Wes’s dialogue is perfect for animation—snappy, zippy, cartoonish, cute, but with an adult wink. It was incredibly well shot and the music was incredible. I just had a really good time. It was a very, very enjoyable film for any human being."