"The album with Faith Healer. No one else around the midwest, apart from us guys, was following this kind of music. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were incredible. They were another band I knew about from reading people like Chris Welch. I could picture what they sounded like just from reading, because back then the writers were real writers. I never got to see The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, but I could visualise what they were like. Alex Harvey got up and played with us at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1980, a couple of years before he died. We did 'Shakin' All Over' and he ate a cassette - what the fuck? They were a mash of cool stuff: the music was haunting and heavy and fun, all at the same time."

"They were a fantastic live band and I saw them loads of times. Watching the way Alex was onstage taught me to let things flow and not be so tight-arsed. He improvised a lot. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band had a sense of threat – this feeling that he was a gangster, a bit of a hard guy, a bit shifty. There was a sense of menace in their stage performance, with Zal Cleminson dressed as this wacky clown, which was unnerving. We went through a phase like that – Paul used to get made up, half his face white and half black – when we did a lot of theatrics and a lot of that comes from Alex Harvey. I used to nail Steve Dawson’s DMs to the stage and he’d lean forward because he was nailed to the floor at the back."

"This is the album with 'Brown Shoes Don't Make It'. What colour shoes are you wearing? Black? Phew. It was the absurdity that I liked in Frank Zappa - this album also had 'Call Any Vegetable'. It was stuff that just didn't make any sense, but they played so well they must know what they're talking about. That was why I liked Soft Machine as well: "Hope for happiness! Happiness! Happiness!" What? I never knew what it was. And that was like The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Arthur Brown, too. Unpredictability is what I like most in rock bands. But only when it's done well. Like with The Who - they had great pop songs, and then they had 'Boris The Spider'."

"This was the first band I ever saw. I went to see The Who at Charlton in 1974, when I was 12 or 13, and we bunked in, and supporting The Who was Alex Harvey. And, fuck me! He had this sort of fake brick wall, and he burst through and started singing ‘Framed’ and it was just a fucking revelation. It’s funny because I’ve been looking at a bit of him on Youtube recently, interviews that he did, and what a fucking character. The bits of film that are left of him, there’s a clip of him singing ‘Framed’ at some festival, and he pours a bottle of beer over his wild curly hair and turns it into a quiff with his hand. It was only when Jerry Leiber from Leiber & Stoller died recently that I realised they wrote that song. He shocked me, with the theatricality, the fearlessness, just doing what the fuck he wanted. They had this song called ‘The Faith Healer‘, which I heard made Johnny Rotten want to be in a band. Just outrageous, but charming and intelligent too. And they did a version of the Jacques Brel song, ‘Next‘, which was just fucking brilliant. He weren’t around for very long, but I have a lifelong love of his work. Just that mixture of comedy and… terror. Perfect!"

"Carol Reed was a brilliant director and a sweet man, but he was not a one-man band like David Lean; he required a strong, patient producer who loved him, as my Uncle Alex did, and a gifted screenwriter, which Alex found for him in the novelist Graham Greene, as well as an art director of genius—my father. He was at his best surrounded by talented people who loved him, who were virtual family, and that shows in his best films, Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, and The Third Man. One unusual aspect of Carol’s gifts was that he was among the rare directors good at working with children—go watch The Third Man and you will be astonished at the brilliant inclusion of the ghastly little boy who accuses Holly Martins of murder. Most of the great directors hate working with animals or children, but Carol—himself the illegitimate son of the great Edwardian actor and theatrical producer Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree—had a natural sympathy and understanding of children. He was in fact childlike himself—hence his choice, later in life, to make a film of the musical Oliver!—and this shows in his direction of Bobby Henrey in this, another of those English films in which good manners manage to hide passion and even murder, except in the alarmingly clear view of a child. Ralph Richardson, dear Ralph, is at his best in the role of the butler."

"""AM is one of my favourite records of the last ten years. I've always liked the fact that Arctic Monkeys sidestepped the indie scene and reinvented themselves as a rock band. I think Alex Turner gets a lot of unfair flak but he's a phenomenal songwriter, one of the best of our generation, and this record in particular has some incredible songs on it. People like rockstars until they don't like rockstars, and then if you're a rockstar you'd better fucking duck. He's always just been himself, and luckily himself is just rock & roll through and through. I'm incredibly jealous of his mind, he's a great guitarist but as a lyricist it's incredibly frustrating to be alive at the same time as him. As a rockstar he just has it, and luckily he's not put too much of a foot wrong yet. As far as I'm concerned he can do no wrong, and I'm putting that all on his lyrics. It's mental that he can squeeze a line like ""She's got a Barbarella silver swimsuit"" into a song and make it relevant, make it just feel new, yet he's referencing things from such a long time ago, probably from before he was alive. He has an understanding of pop culture and is a master of manipulating it to do whatever he wants. As a lyricist myself it's quite amazing to see."""