"Sometimes my biggest reasons for connecting to a film are simple, primitive, just about a feeling. Videodrome and Repo Man are two that fit into that category. In addition to the fact that it costars Debbie Harry in my favorite roll of hers, I love Videodrome for its particular use of my hometown, Toronto. Sure, Toronto is used in films all the time, but usually disguised as New York, or Chicago or Detroit. No filmmaker has used Toronto better and more consistently over the years than our hometown hero Cronenberg, though, and Videodrome he shot and set in the downtown Toronto of my childhood, complete with a central part of the story revolving around our local cable station CityTV (as “Civic TV,” the station James Woods’s character, Max Renn, works for), which really did play soft-core porn if you stayed up late enough. To this day, my dad lives on the street Max Renn lives on, and Barry Convex’s Spectacular Optical is a bakery on the same street as the Electric Youth studio downtown, just a minute away, making the connection both past and present. Repo Man has my favorite Criterion release cover art; it’s amazing and designed by movie poster artist Jay Shaw, who also designed the artwork for singles from our album Innerworld. With Repo Man you get Harry Dean Stanton in his first big-screen lead role, Emilio Estevez as his partner, and the streets of Reagan-era Los Angeles set to a classic punk soundtrack. What more would I need to love this film? Nothing. But like with all great Criterion selections, there’s always something new to take from it with every watch."

"Sometimes my biggest reasons for connecting to a film are simple, primitive, just about a feeling. Videodrome and Repo Man are two that fit into that category. In addition to the fact that it costars Debbie Harry in my favorite roll of hers, I love Videodrome for its particular use of my hometown, Toronto. Sure, Toronto is used in films all the time, but usually disguised as New York, or Chicago or Detroit. No filmmaker has used Toronto better and more consistently over the years than our hometown hero Cronenberg, though, and Videodrome he shot and set in the downtown Toronto of my childhood, complete with a central part of the story revolving around our local cable station CityTV (as “Civic TV,” the station James Woods’s character, Max Renn, works for), which really did play soft-core porn if you stayed up late enough. To this day, my dad lives on the street Max Renn lives on, and Barry Convex’s Spectacular Optical is a bakery on the same street as the Electric Youth studio downtown, just a minute away, making the connection both past and present. Repo Man has my favorite Criterion release cover art; it’s amazing and designed by movie poster artist Jay Shaw, who also designed the artwork for singles from our album Innerworld. With Repo Man you get Harry Dean Stanton in his first big-screen lead role, Emilio Estevez as his partner, and the streets of Reagan-era Los Angeles set to a classic punk soundtrack. What more would I need to love this film? Nothing. But like with all great Criterion selections, there’s always something new to take from it with every watch."

"In the late 70s, I was moving to New York and I was inspired by all this stuff coming out of CBGB’s, and Talking Heads was one of the hugest influences at that time. I started to read about them, and I guess when I heard that record I wasn’t really sure what I thought of it. Some weeks later they came through Binghamton, New York where I was in University. This was the first tour they did after Jerry Harrison joined the band, it must have been late ‘77 or early ‘78 they were still touring in a station wagon, I remember seeing them drive up and they were playing this same little pub out the edge of the campus that my band were playing. As soon as I saw them it was like everything clicked. This was one of the most impressive concerts I’d ever seen and all of a sudden their music became super important to me. I’ve been listening to a lot of their records recently. I was going to choose Fear Of Music because that’s the record I’ve been listening to again right now and I’ve always thought that was their obscure third record but I didn’t realise it had ‘Life During Wartime’ on it and stuff like that and ‘Cities’, but they were such an incredible, experimental band. That period of music –Talking Heads and Elvis Costello and Television and Devo’s first record, those records all seemed to define a new period of music for me and it wasn’t exactly punk, it wasn’t ‘God Save The Queen’ or ‘Tommy Gun’ or whatever The Clash were coming out with (which was also really strong), it just struck me as art music for the era."

"The first heard time I heard Roxy Music I was smitten. I was in a record store and I asked the guy ‘What are you playing?’ They used to put the record jackets on the front desk, I picked it up and they looked like a band from outer space. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but I loved everything about it, ‘Virginia Plain’ was just an incredible sounding song. It’s the way the synthesiser bends at the start, then the songs kicks in and Bryan Ferry’s singing is so over the top and melodramatic, I’m not even sure what he’s singing about. There’s those breaks where they jam in the middle, the keyboard and synth solos. It was the sonic template, it sounded completely otherworldly to me. I felt a kinship with Roxy Music. I grew up listening to The Who and The Beatles and they were rock stars, but I felt Roxy Music were sort of my peers. With a lot of the new wave and punk bands I thought ‘I can do this, I can be in bands and do what they’re doing.’ It didn’t sound anything like the classic rock records I’d been listening to, it was arty, very flamboyant and kind of crude in a way. It was a bit pretentious but I liked that, I found it really fresh at the time that they had an art-school approach to the music and yet the music was very DIY, it wasn’t slick. They were great musicians but didn’t sound like virtuoso bands like Yes or Emerson, Lake and Palmer, though I did have some ELP records too! I fell in love with Roxy Music, I bought all their records, their solo records and live bootlegs. I was the self-appointed president of the Roxy Music fan club in Madison, there were only seven members. For a couple of years, once every two months we’d have a ‘Roxython’ on a Saturday night until the sun came up, we’d play their albums and dress up in very flamboyant clothes. It was great."