"I had an instant soft spot for Ari Aster when he treated anaphylaxis (in “Hereditary”) as the terror that it really is, whilst some other contemporary directors sadly still think someone’s face swelling up is hilarious. “Midsommar” really goes to places untraveled. I heard a lot about its folk-horror roots along with similarities to “The Wicker Man,” but I keyed much more into its cathartic wail borne out of grief. I remember seeing a video of the performance artist and musician, John Duncan lying naked on the floor and letting out an extraordinarily protracted primal scream and the dark heart of “Midsommar” lies somewhere within that realm for me. The film is brimming with the explosive power of grief and it’s one of the starkest examples I can think of in modern cinema. My first reaction when seeing all that verdant grass was the almost invisible menace of ticks — an anxiety that Aster quickly acknowledges. The fear of tick-borne encephalitis is not unusual in both Sweden and Hungary where the film was shot and in some askew and unintentional way, I could imagine seeing the film alternately as a fever dream of someone who had been afflicted by the disease during a meadow ritual. Of course, the front of house is hallucinogenic folk horror, but maybe I bypassed that due to my lack of knowledge, which led to a more primal and simplistic interpretation. I was also blown away by the presence of Björn Andrésen, whom I remember from Visconti’s “Death in Venice.” Aster’s film buff credentials are really to the fore here even though I’m aware that nobody sadly uses the term “film buff” anymore. The ghosts of Bergman, Jancsó and Paradjanov circle the film."

"This was a bit later in my life, around 2000. This signals the end of me having hang-ups really. I remember when 'Re-Rewind' by Artful Dodger came out, and I thought, ""This is fucking cool!"" So much about it confused me. It didn't have chords or a bassline really, it was made of odd sounds like breaking glass that didn't really fit. And then it had this guy on top of it singing this really pleasing, really hooky, catchy little melody. It was the furthest thing away from me at the time. I was into crashing drums and cymbals, but I knew there was something in there that really turned me on musically. When I admitted that I liked that to myself, it really opened up a lot of doors to me, into R&B and Destiny's Child and R. Kelly, lots of stuff that would have been previously out of my usual sphere of influence. I embraced it, and there were things I really liked. With people like R. Kelly, I spend 50 per cent of the time laughing at him and the rest thinking, this is actually good. A huge influence on my music is the singing quickly, and the singing something absurd, and then something serious, hooky, melodic, quick and light. Craig David did that brilliantly. The singles on that album are fucking amazing! He kind of lost his way after that, but I wanted to show that that whole world is very much embraced by me, and to show that we shouldn't be snobby, that it doesn't matter whether the influence is The Cheeky Girls or Pink Floyd, it just doesn't matter where it comes from. If it's good, I embrace it, and I think Craig David is a perfect example of someone who is laughably bad but secretly a pretty good artist."

"I think the idea is happening upon something without any clue as to what context it comes from. That has been the important thing to me. What do they think about this? Is this pop music to them? Is it religious? One very good example for me was I was in Ibiza listening to North African radio stations and this Arabic song came on and I thought: ""Fuck, I've never heard anything like that."" I had a cassette recorder in this little ghetto blaster so I managed to record a little bit of it, but I couldn't figure out what the name of the artist was or anything, so again I just used to walk into record shops where they sold Arabic records and I would sing this song, but I never found it like that. Then I was in Egypt about 12 years later and I was in a market, and there was a guy selling loads of cassettes so I sang this song to him, and in the meantime I'd changed all of the lyrics, which were in Arabic, into English. In fact, the lyrics I've since found out are ""hebeena, hebeena"", but I was singing it as ""heaviness, heaviness"". So I sung this whole song in English to him with this Arabic melody and he was cracking up. He called all his mates over from the other local stalls and was getting me to do it again. So I sang it again and then asked him, ""What is this song?"" and he said that it was Farid El Atrache. He picked out this cassette and that was the song, I'd finally found it. So to have that experience is almost impossible now."

"Unfortunately I never saw them, but Kilburn & The High Roads [Ian Dury’s first band] used to play near where we were hanging around as kids. I was a couple of years younger than the rest of the band, who went to see them at the Tally-Ho. They were a huge phenomenon round our way. And they made a great album called Handsome, but a lot of the stuff Ian Dury was working towards on that album really came to fruition on New Boots And Panties. It was slightly infused by the whole punk thing, it had that wild energy, but it still had that vaudevillian faded grandeur of the music hall. Again, it’s about comedy and terror: “arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks” is a pretty fun thing to hear when you’re a teenager, coming out of the speakers! He was pretty acerbic in person. I remember I was with Clive Langer once, our producer, and he said “Ian, I love your work” and Ian said “So fucking what?” That was about the strength of it, with Ian. We got to know him better near the end. He played one of our Madstock gigs, and we recorded a track with him just before he died, called ‘Drip-Fed Fred’, which is rather good. I think he always saw us as slightly usurping him, which is kind of true. He could be very acidic. When he was working in our studio, I remember the police were called a couple of times. But an amazing artist and fantastic lyricist, and of course you listen to some of those songs now, ‘Clever Trevor’, ‘Billericay Dickie’, ‘Plaistow Patricia’ and all that, and they haven’t dated at all."

"Head is my favorite film that stars a musical artist, by some degree. And yes, that includes the brilliant A Hard Day’s Night. However, the Monkees’ triumph of a movie is a Pyrrhic victory, because Head accelerated their demise, as it sees Dolenz, Nesmith, Tork, and Jones push the self-destruct button. Directed by Bob Rafelson and cowritten by Jack Nicholson, the movie shows the Monkees tearing down their wholesome network-TV, pre–Fab Four image with wild style. Much has been read into this stream-of-consciousness movie, with its overlapping dream sequences, surreal song numbers, and drug-influenced chaos. The simplest way of describing it is this: the Monkees are sick of being on their network show and attempt to break out of the studio lot, literally and figuratively. There are several scenes where the Monkees are trapped in a box, a live number where they are revealed to be plastic mannequins, and bookending sequences where the members commit suicide. So basically, the Monkees want out. There have been some claims by the Monkees since the film came out that this message was projected onto it by Rafelson and Nicholson, but the script was clearly born of a very real frustration with their image. The movie bombed in 1968, because not many Monkees fans wanted to know that their idols had painted-on smiles. What remains is a gem of rock music cinema, with great songs and images throughout. Plus, as depressing as the theme of entrapment is, it’s frequently very funny. I got to interview Dolenz about it at a New Beverly Q&A once. A young audience member quizzed him on the deeper themes, and he just replied, “Man, I was twenty-three . . .”"

"What would Fellini do after La dolce vita? We all wondered. How would he top himself? Would he even want to top himself? Would he shift gears? Finally, he did something that no one could have anticipated at the time. He took his own artistic and life situation—that of a filmmaker who had eight and a half films to his name (episodes for two omnibus films and a shared credit with Alberto Lattuada on Variety Lights counted for him as one and a half films, plus seven), achieved international renown with his last feature and felt enormous pressure when the time came for a follow-up—and he built a movie around it. 8½ has always been a touchstone for me, in so many ways—the freedom, the sense of invention, the underlying rigor and the deep core of longing, the bewitching, physical pull of the camera movements and the compositions (another great black-and-white film: every image gleams like a pearl—again, shot by Gianni Di Venanzo). But it also offers an uncanny portrait of being the artist of the moment, trying to tune out all the pressure and the criticism and the adulation and the requests and the advice, and find the space and the calm to simply listen to oneself. The picture has inspired many movies over the years (including Alex in Wonderland, Stardust Memories, and All That Jazz), and we’ve seen the dilemma of Guido, the hero played by Marcello Mastroianni, repeated many times over in reality—look at the life of Bob Dylan during the period we covered in No Direction Home, to take just one example. Like with The Red Shoes, I look at it again every year or so, and it’s always a different experience."

"For me this album was a pivotal moment in my life when I was 17 years-old. I bought it the opening day it came out – at midnight at Tower Records. I went home, played it and it blew my mind with its baroque production and how ambitious it was lyrically. I felt 'Oh my god, someone who is alive right now is making album the way people like David Bowie, Bob Dylan and The Beatles did.' It really felt like a fully realised act of genius. The lyrics were so mysterious to me and beautifully written. I still think about the songs all the time, and their cool landscape lyrics about decay and death. It's Leonard Cohen-ish. I was astounded by the whole vision and wondered how anyone who is alive right now make something so good. Growing up with other hero bands of mine like Nirvana, I always thought these refined masterpiece records were a thing of the past and that my generation were slackers who wouldn't aspire to make stuff on that level, but when Beck made Mutations he was a master artist showing you an actual jewel he'd made. It was so inspiring. More importantly, for me the day I heard Mutations is the day I decided to get a notebook and carried it around in my pocket everywhere I went, just to write down everything I was thinking. It turned me into a walking scribe of my interior landscape. I just try to excavate all my ideas onto notebook pages and I've been chronic notebooker ever since. I've never not had an endless scroll of notebooks. The reason I bought my first notebook was because of this record's quality, it set me on a creative path."

"I remember the exact moment I learned to play this song. It was at my great aunt’s house in Dunstable, Massachusetts. She lived in this old house on a farm and there was this old mouldy, mildewy, acoustic guitar there. “There wasn’t much else to do and I learned to play “Wild Thing” on the guitar. My cousin showed me how to play it and I was hooked, I could sing and play it at the same time and it was like ‘This is amazing.’ I rode a 300cc motorcycle around the backyard and played that guitar. “But the one that really changed the game for me was “Louie Louie”, which was E, A, B Minor. It’s got this sinister, evil vibe to it but it’s very subtle, and the artist in me responded to the drama of the B Minor. Also, it was the fact that the lyrics are incoherent. Apparently, nobody really knows the true lyrics to that song and with “Louie Louie” you can mumble the words, so that was great. “I’m always thinking back to the moment where I realised that was what I wanted to do, ‘When was it and what happened?’ I think it was much later, when I had a cassette deck that had this mic mix feature, where you could plug a microphone in and overdub onto your song. When I started screwing with that, that’s when I think I got the bug. I became obsessed with it and it felt like there was endless potential there. “Louie Louie” is a very historical song, so I chose that as my first. I like to think it’s the first song I really liked to play, because “Wild Thing” was too easy maybe. ‘Mythical’ is a great word for “Louie Louie”, it’s got that folklore to it"

"Ziggy was like the entry level for me. I wasn't aware when I bought it that I was buying a concept album about a constructed creature called Ziggy Stardust. I just thought David Bowie WAS Ziggy Stardust. I must have been 12 or 13. I had a friend at school called Peter May who I sat next to, and we were both totally into the same things, like David and Marc. We both bought acoustic guitars and we'd have jamming sessions on Sunday nights at his parent's house, and I would learn the songs of both of them. It really sparked my imagination, and for a whole generation of people, Angie and David were the It couple for us. Forget about Mick [Jagger] and Bianca - that held no interest for me whatsoever, compared to Angie & David's glittering bisexual glamour. That was all a big part of it too, and that - for me - was when sexuality entered into it and I heard the word 'bisexual'. I'd heard the word 'queer' - but I'd never heard the word 'bisexual' or even an artist claiming they were. That was a huge moment for me. From Ziggy onwards, there was no looking back after that. I played truant from school to queue up to get tickets for that final tour of the Spiders, and Aladdin Sane was out by then, and I went to see him at the Liverpool Empire and it was mindblowing. And you know, Ian McCulloch, Marc Almond, Pete Burns - a whole generation of people who were to be the next wave were all there. It was an incredible world of glamour. I know they call it glam rock, but to me that was Sweet. David and Bryan [Ferry] - they were artists."

"That moment I had when I was young, listening to White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground… I mentioned there's a song called 'The Gift', and John Cale narrates it. It's about a man who mails himself to his girlfriend as a present. She opens it, and she fucking kills him. I remember… I didn't realise John Cale was Welsh when I was 15. I remember listening to that song and I was like, "Fuck me! That sounds like a Welsh voice!". My mind exploded: one of the pivotal members of The Velvet Underground was a Taff! Anything is possible baby… I really got into John Cale from that moment onwards. I think if you get into John Cale you go to Paris 1919, which is an amazing album and some would say his best, but Slow Dazzle really pushes it for top spot. Number one, it has one of the best covers of all time: he does a cover of 'Heartbreak Hotel' which is a brilliant, brilliant cover. And he goes from that to 'Ski Patrol', and there's another song called 'I'm Not The Loving Kind', which is almost like a Harry Nilsson, beautifully orchestrated, melancholic plea to a lover. So he goes from serrated acuteness of 'Heartbreak Hotel' to the lushness of 'I'm Not The Loving Kind', which is just one of the great motivational songs of all time. In a strange way it just motivates you so much. This is where John Cale got his game together: he realised he was an experimental musician who could also write amazing tunes. And this is where you actually hear him not scared of his voice anymore. This was the start of his true greatness. As a solo artist he's nearly unsurpassable to me."