"Seventeen Seconds is my favorite Cure album. It wasn’t the first one I heard; I bought Japanese Whispers and then The Head on the Door, both on cassette tape, and used to listen to them while I did my newspaper delivery round at the age of about 15 in Oxford. But then I went back and started getting into the earlier Cure records. With the people I knew, Pornography and Faith were both really big, but I gravitated toward Seventeen Seconds because it was less heavy, more minimal. Like most of their albums, it has its own unique sound. My favorite track off the album is ‘Play for Today,’ and I was absolutely buzzing when we played with them in Greece last week and they played this and ‘A Forest’ together in the setlist."

"This goes back to when I was a child, and me and my older brother were in the house together. This is the era video games come into play too, because this is where me and my brother started fighting over the TV and what's being played loud in the house. This was me and my brother fighting over the over Nintendo and Sega Genesis, while he's practising on a drum pillow. Dave Weckl was a massive musician to us when we were young, and John Patitucci, we were into him a little bit, and Frank Gambale of course. We would listen to this album a bit religiously – this is how we wanted our instruments. We would play with this and we would learn the album. I actually wasn't excited about this album until my later years, because it being tied to such an emotional place. When I got of age and realised how important this album was, I revisited it and there's nothing like it still, sonically. For who it was and what it did, there's nothing like this album. There's actually a moment where I do get synaesthesia from this album, it's somewhere between 'No Zone' and 'India Town'. I literally remember standing up in front of TV playing The Karate Kid, and I remember listening to this and feeling so happy, I felt weightless. This is me, the musician, the one that was practicing, playing jazz band. I didn't know too much about anything, but I knew that I couldn't play Nintendo without Chick Corea in the background."

"Tokyo monogatari, perhaps better known to non-Nipponophiles as Tokyo Story. Any film by the great Yasujiro Ozu will do, especially if it has Japan’s walked-away-in-mid-career huge star, the divine, mysterious, heart-seducing Setsuko Hara, who, Garbo-like and at the peak of her popularity, vanished into obscurity, never to return to the screen. I discovered her hideout in Kamakura, Japan, and briefly glimpsed her, refuting my cabdriver’s assurance that she was long dead. She lives yet, in her mid-nineties. Don’t pass this way without losing your heart to Miss Hara—Japan’s “eternal virgin”—on the screen. Also, same film, the great Chishu Ryu, who teaches the entire acting profession how to play, at a still youngish age, an ancient and enfeebled oldster. He is, one critic said, “old in his bones.”"