"That said, I love the more ancient sides of British culture as well. This reminds of a really broody, Autumnal day years ago – when there was all this low, grey cloud – when I decided I was going to go to the Avebury Stone Circle. When I was first there, it was deserted and perfect. 

A little while later, I heard a break in the quietness –someone else had arrived. Then I heard these big footsteps, and Robert Plant – Robert Plant appeared from behind a stone! It was an absolutely perfect moment.

I was too shy to say anything, of course, but when I was leaving, there he was at the car park, and, argh, his car was next to mine. I got into the driver's seat, I caught his eye, so I wound down the window…and I just couldn't think what to say, so I just grinned and gave him a big thumbs-up! We've met properly since, but whenever I think of Led Zeppelin, I think of him emerging from the mists like a druid.

I also didn't hear this until I was 27, and then I was all, oh, no wonder they're so popular, this is fantastic! Music was tribal to me when I was a teenager. I was a real indie kid who didn't listen to rock at all. Now I listen to it often, and I think of the house where they made this album, the other side of the mountains to where I live, and it really feels like this music comes from this very old, rooted place. And 'The Battle Of Evermore', with Sandy Denny's voice – I love how the whole of the end-of-the-60s British folk moment is caught up in the way she sings. I love the way those traditions connect us to something deeper.

"

"I think I discovered that record when I was in seventh grade. It's like a perfect album, from beginning to end, which is a difficult thing to achieve. I've been a fan of AC/DC for years. Highway To Hell is another record I think is pretty perfect. That record was so huge and it hit so hard, it was a kind of bookmarker in your life, for me and millions of people. Oddly enough we went through a few things that they had to. Down the road we would go through the loss of a member and make a decision to continue on and do it successfully. I thought it was such a brave thing for AC/DC to triumph over that sort of tragedy [the death of singer Bon Scott in 1980], to continue to have their sound, and also to have Brian on such a fucking impactful record - it’s obviously charged with a ton of emotion from losing Bon. That process, it was a fairly quick change. Brian wasn't trying to sound like Bon, but it's still AC/DC. Our band is a kind of parallel in a way. When I started I was more of a rhythm player in whatever band I played in, so I really identified with Malcolm [Young], yet I was wanting to play lead like Angus. He's a phenomenal lead player, but I've always thought the backbone of band is the rhythm guitar. I guess a lot of the bands that I like are dual guitar bands. And I actually really wanted another guitar player in this band when we first started, but the other guys didn't want one, so I had to learn to play a little bit [laughs]."

"I used to tell Mel Brooks stories about the guys I knew hanging around a diner, and he mentioned Fellini’s I vitelloni as something I should see. Back in those days, it was very hard to find a film like that. So I wrote Diner and eventually saw I vitelloni. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t see it before making Diner. If I did, I think it might have made me too intimidated to write about my own friends."

"My fifth film — it’s the movie that literally got me wanting to make movies to begin with — is the David Cronenberg film Scanners. When I was a kid, I was a little weird kid, and I loved horror films, I loved gore films. When Michael Ironside made that guy’s head explode in that movie, I was like, “Whatever this is, I want to do this!” I was ten, eleven years old, and my parents would take me to see these. Like, I saw The Exorcist in movie theaters; I saw The Evil Dead in a movie theater. I went to see all this crazy, freaky s*** that you would never take a little kid to see today. But I saw Jaws in a movie theater. Like, I wanted to see all these scary movies, and my parents were like, “Absolutely. Let’s go.” And so here I was, as a teenager, learning how to make my own blood, and my own scars and wounds. I wanted to be Rick Baker or Tom Savini. When I was a kid, that’s who I looked up to. When I saw An American Werewolf in London, it was phenomenal, to see all those makeup special effects they were doing. And then when I went to high school and learned you could actually go to college to study film and learn how to make movies, I was like, “I’m in. That’s exactly what I want to do.”"

"In terms of mind-blowing experiences, I would say the first film was Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, just because I think — I’m pretty sure — that’s the first time I ever saw a live action movie in a movie theater as a kid. My dad took me and my brother to see it. I think up till then I’d only seen one animated movie in a movie theater. I think it was Robin Hood, which, for some reason, was really boring to me. But we went to see Willy Wonka, and I was so blown away, and it so freaked me out, that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for years. I had watched movies on TV and stuff, but that was the first time I think I was old enough to go to the movies, and be able to sit through a movie without wanting to get up and run around the theater. Just seeing it that big and getting sucked into it. I don’t even think I realized those were actors and that anything was fake. I think I just thought it was all real, that Charlie was a real kid, and Willy Wonka was a real person. I really think I thought it was real. I really thought the whole family lived in that one room. I was probably in second grade or something… So I probably didn’t actually think it was real, but I responded to it like it was real."

"It was really difficult to choose a David Bowie album. I didn’t want to put more than one on. For me, it was a choice between this, Low, “Heroes” and …Ziggy Stardust… – all equally magnificent records. This record I like because it was before he became a superstar. There’s a lightness and lack of self-awareness on this record, which I think disappears slightly on the later records. Songs like 'Kooks' have this real sense of fresh openness, which maybe he lost on later records, which I really love. There’s also some pretty odd moments on there as well, like 'Andy Warhol'. I don’t mean so much the ‘sample and hold’ start on the ARP synth – which is really cool – but melodically it’s really odd. It’s more like an Eastern scale than a regular rock & roll scale. It will go from that to something that sounds more like a music hall moment. The songwriting is incredible. I think it’s probably him at his best. Also, when I was going through my choices, I went for records I enjoy from start to finish, even though there’s a couple of songs that I don’t think are spectacular songs on this album, as a whole it’s a really great record. I remember distinctly buying it from the Oxfam shop around the corner from school when I was a kid, and I think it was the first Bowie album I ever owned. My mum had the compilation Changes Bowie which I’ve always loved, so when I saw this I was ""ooh, I like David Bowie, I should try this"". I put it on and thought, ""God, there’s a lot more going on here than just catchy pop songs""."