"They famously reformed last year and I've seen them a couple of times and played on the same bill with them. One of my great regrets was that I came to this album a couple of years after it came out and my friends had all been to the show when they came through town and I missed it. It felt like a concert I should have been at. Part of it was that I hated guitar bands. In high school I was into terrible progressive rock like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes, while all my friends were into Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth. I always thought I was in the right and it was them who was barking up the wrong tree, which subsequently has made me a little bit embarrassed, because it was the 90s - I should've been listening to Sonic Youth. But I was firmly committed against guitar music and it was the same friends, like Ryan [Smith] - who's in my band now playing guitar and keyboards and other stuff, and who's been my friend since I was 11 or 12 - who was the guy in the Dinosaur Jr. T-shirt trying to get me to play organ chords in the background for his band, and I was grumbling away, ""When the fuck do I get my solo?"" And he introduced me to Neutral Milk Hotel. It's kind of an obvious way in for me, because it very much has that sound - the spiritual free jazz and the horns and the power and the instruments from around the world, different bagpipe kind of instruments - for me, it has that same spirit and wildness. It's also one of those albums, like the Pharoah Sanders, where the songs are all essentially the same song. And I don't mean that to diminish the achievement of this record because I think it's amazing, but when you have a record where you listen to the first song and the melody is so elemental to me - it's like it existed before this album was written - and then later on you hear another song and it's the same melody but inverted. Not in a technical sense, but you get the impression that these songs all come from the same tree and I love that. That's one of the things that the album format can do - tie things together like that. I've done that myself consciously on my records in the past - reprised a melody. On Our Love there are two songs that are essentially the same song revisited - 'All I Ever Need' and 'Your Love Will Set You Free'. Not the melody, but the underlying riff and the harmony."

"The Horrors were recently on the tour bus discussing which is our favourite Iggy Pop song. It didn’t even have to be an Iggy song, just a song that he was involved in. My mind went instantly to The Stooges, who are one of the all-time great bands. The Horrors played Rock The House Festival with The Stooges years ago, back in 2007. I was only 21 years old and I got to interview Iggy Pop for NME. I loved The Stooges and talked about them with Iggy Pop for the whole interview. Looking back on it I would have wanted to talk to him about his solo records, because The Idiot is just a brilliant piece of music and interesting in that it’s kind of an early incarnation of industrial music. 'Mass Production’ is so warped, the synth at the end comes in perfectly out of tune – it just sounds brilliant. The first time I heard it I was going through the Bowie in Berlin book shortly after I interviewed Iggy Pop. I’d listened to The Stooges loads, MC5 were one of my favourite bands as a kid and I was looking for something that had this sort of factory made heaviness to it. The song is so dystopian, and dystopian music is definitely something The Horrors do. Most of the songs coming out around that time were emotion led, but ‘Mass Production’ is bleaker. It’s the kind of song you’d listen to at the end of the night when things start to go a bit south. In just one song it sounds like a full body of work and I still listen to it frequently now. Although The Idiot isn’t necessarily representative of Iggy Pop’s work, it does feel just like him to me. If I was to pick something representative of Iggy Pop then I would probably choose the Stooges’ song ‘I’m Sick of You’. In some ways maybe ‘Mass Production’ is more of a Bowie expression, but they clearly built up an amazing rapport and these two creatives made something that perhaps they couldn’t have made on their own and that makes it unique. It feels like a once in a lifetime pairing. I just think Iggy Pop is one of the greatest of all time. He’s an all-time icon of music and expression. And he’s also a great guy, you can get that just by listening to his radio show. People always say things like ‘Don’t meet your heroes’ or whatever, but I don’t need the musicians I respect to be nice people or people I can be friends with. It just so happened that Iggy Pop was a kind guy. And that made it really enjoyable."

"Number four is the documentary American Movie. The reason I like this movie so much is I’m a big fan of sort of vérité documentaries and, while this is not exactly a vérité documentary, it’s a movie from the late ’90s and it’s sort of the end of the 16mm personal documentary era. I suppose there are some that exist after that, but for the most part, as someone who really likes movies like Grey Gardens and Seventeen and all these great sort of authentic… Filmmakers went and experienced their experiences with their subjects. American Movie is really like the pinnacle of that for me in that it’s a movie that took two years to make and two years to edit. It’s the kind of movie where when you hear Chris Smith, the director, ask a question, you almost get excited because it’s like, “Oh, the guy from behind the camera is a part of the story also?” Or the boom dips in. It’s charming because you know they’ve been there for two years living with these people. The movie’s amazing because it’s an incredible critique on filmmaking that’s both funny and also sort of sentimental and inspiring in that the Murphy’s Law of filmmaking is that anything that can go wrong will go wrong and, you know, in the case of [subject] Mark Borchardt, it really does. But you’ve never seen someone more impassioned and more determined to sort of accomplish… I don’t know if I want to say something as silly as “their dreams,” but he’s dedicated to doing this and that. To me as a filmmaker or as someone who’s trying to do any sort of artistic endeavor, it’s really amazing to watch, and the movie is very sincere and very honest and very charming and very funny. It gives you an idea of, like, what to avoid when making movies, but it also gives you an idea of what movies are going to be very hard — I would say that making movies is very traumatic — and you’ve just sort of got to stick with it, and this movie is a great example of that. And it’s a great example of getting to know the characters personally, or the subjects personally, and it’s the kind of movie that, when it’s over, you feel like you know everybody in that movie. It’s incredibly charming and it’s one of those movies that I think, as a filmmaker or just a film fan in general, it’s a very essential movie to see. I always try to watch it or show it to people right before we make a movie to say, like, hopefully it won’t go like this."

"I’d heard ‘Starman’ on the radio before going to school, and as most lads are, I was interested in football and outer space. Something about his voice and the opening line, just that thing he’d tapped into, and it was me he was suggesting to look out the window. It’s hard to comprehend the impact he had when he came out. I turned 13 in the May of ’72 and it was such a special time and gave my life magical class. I grew up in Norris Green, skint, and what he did was give the gift of inspiration. He changed the world in loads of ways and was probably the last great special person to do that. It was head and shoulders above anything else. To come out looking like that he could have had the biggest backlash. If you ever want to see star quality watch that Top Of The Pops clip, which is what gave me the idea that you need stage presence – you don’t just need it on stage, you need it in life. I missed those years of myself, in how naïve I was, and how un-laddy I was. I was into footy and stuff, but through the Bunnymen I found my own confidence. I was thinking of getting some bangles – thank God I didn’t. The thing about Bowie is that no-one else could have pulled it off. He was hardly ever on telly, and he never went on and mimed. It was just everything about it. People who missed it must’ve been stupid. I remember after Top Of The Pops going to school and asked my mates if they’d seen it and they said, “yeah – the fucking queer.” I didn’t even see that. I didn’t see it as a sexual thing, I wouldn’t have minded if I had have done. It made some sense because I was probably more androgynous than him through my teenage years – girls would ask me if I was a boy or a girl. I’d always tell them they could put their hands down me kecks and find out. When Bowie shaved his eyebrows off I knew something was up. That’s how you can pinpoint when Ziggy ends. His hair started to change and that’s when he stopped being so from-outer-space. I’m very exact on it, because it almost broke my heart. Without Bowie, obviously I’d have been centre-forward for Liverpool. It wouldn’t have been a bad career playing for Liverpool. I was a goal-hanging bastard. Fantastic shot, but I didn’t particularly like going into the 50-50s, the life-threateners. And my eyesight went to shite when I was 13."

"I’ve always found Robert Montgomery to be a somewhat mysterious figure. He was in comedies, but he never seemed very funny. He played likable people but was not well liked. His right-wing politics angered many on the left. In 1947, the year this film came out, he was the president of the Screen Actors Guild. As a friendly witness for HUAC, he hurt many careers. He directed and starred in two great, innovative noirs, Lady in the Lake and Ride the Pink Horse, both made in 1947, and then stopped directing. Wanda Hendrix, who is superb in this film, really didn’t work much after Ride the Pink Horse, which is another aspect that makes watching the film curious and special. Starring as Pancho, the excellent Thomas Gomez became the first Hispanic American to be nominated for an Oscar. This postwar noir film begins at a bus stop in a Mexican border town. When Montgomery, as Lucky Gagin, steps off the bus, you pretty much know he’s going to get mixed up in something dark. The film has a haunting score, and it is reminiscent of another Mexican border “noir” by another actor-director, Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. There are a couple of things that make Ride the Pink Horse art-house cool. First, it’s filled with long, complicated takes, which were innovative for the time. I remember sitting with Martin Scorsese, who turned me on to this movie. He kept trying to figure out how Montgomery had done the opening shot, where he gets off the bus and goes into the bus station, then back outside again. Scorsese said, “There was no Steadicam. I don’t see tracking. How did he do it?” So look for that! There’s sentimentality in Montgomery’s directing that contrasts with hard-boiled Lucky Gagin and that gives the film heart. Dorothy B. Hughes is the author of the books that both Ride the Pink Horse and In a Lonely Place are based on. These stories have something in common. A violent man is changed by the innocent love of a woman. In In a Lonely Place, he changes too late and loses the girl. In Ride the Pink Horse, Gagin is a solitary and cynical figure. Even while Pila is helping him, he derides her with all kinds of racist remarks. Yet she is his savior and continues to help him. It’s the oddball nature of their relationship that hooks you. He’s so powerful, such a tough guy, yet he needs this child to help him. She in turn is drawn to him. They can’t be together romantically, but there is love between them. She saves his life and his soul by her intervention."