"I think The Hope Six Demolition Project and Let England Shake are this two pronged attack which is utterly perfect, entirely relevant and so important to be releasing this late into her career. I'd listened to Let England Shake a lot, and I felt PJ Harvey had changed so drastically with that record, and The Hope Six follows on from that so beautifully. I remember hearing 'The Ministry of Defence' and calling Dean [Richardson, Rattlesnakes guitarist] saying, 'Have you heard the new PJ Harvey? How are we going to release our album now? She's written a dirtier record than we could ever do.' It's amazing to see someone with that history in music release something that relevant, here's an artist who's so deep into her career and I think it's one of the greatest records she's made. She's definitely an inspiration; I think any artist writing at the minute would be foolish to not include some of the tragedies we're witnessing in the world. As artists we have a platform and a responsibility to talk about things that matter. They matter to me and they clearly matter to her as well. I find it incredibly frustrating that [more artists aren't addressing issues]. Either say something important or fuck off, essentially. Someone said a long time ago that stupidity was more of a problem than evil. Evil can be fought against, it can be revealed to be what it is, you can see it and name it and rally against it. Stupidity is much more dangerous because it allows evil to grow and breed and become the norm; you can't reason with a stupid person. I think when I see bands that aren't writing about anything important or releasing music that has no importance to them, I'm not trying to be overly political with my new record, it's a record about human relationships, but it was important for me to include [some political themes] because it's what's surrounded me for the last couple of years. We'll see who's got the courage."

"It’s in my top five list of best films ever made. I just think it’s perfect. It’s an amazing portrait of an artist, an amazing portrait of a family, Crumb is an incredible central character. I feel like whenever I watch that movie — I sort of watch it every couple years — I start talking like him afterwards. I mean he really infects me in a way that totally changes the way that I look at the world. All great artists have that sort of ability. When I read some of my favorite novelists after I put down one of their books, I’m thinking in their words. I’m seeing the world through their eyes and it’s the same with Crumb. I’m a big fan of his comics, but that film does such an amazing job putting you kind of in his headspace. It also looks amazing, it’s shot on film, Zwigoff does an incredible job framing Crumb’s world, and the Jazz music. it’s just great, I just think it’s great. I think the movie’s a pleasure to watch. I mean, his brother Charles is f—ing incredible, man. Like, the idea that this family produced not one great artist, three great artists. And that Crumb was actually the one who was political enough and sophisticated enough and just barely enough of a people person that his art got seen. But, you know, Charles and Matt also were like really pushing the boundaries of the stuff and also hugely influential on Crumb’s stuff. You don’t get Robert without Charles. You just never sort of have access to those stories the way that this documentary has access to that family. It’s a lot to think about, the artwork that we end up getting as a culture, you know, often times is less about what’s better, and more about how savvy the artist is and how able they are to kind of be in the right place at the right time so that there’s an audience for the work."

"I used to think of Godard and Antonioni as the great modern visual artists of cinema—great colorists who composed frames the way painters composed their canvases. I still think so, but I also connect with them on the emotional level. And for me, Contempt is one of the most moving films of its era. At the time, people talked a lot about the unlikely combination of artists involved: a multilingual Carlo Ponti production of an Alberto Moravia novel, starring Brigitte Bardot, costarring Michel Piccoli and Jack Palance, set at Cinecittà and in the Casa Malaparte in Capri, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, with Fritz Lang as himself. The film itself got a little lost in the fixation on the details. It’s interesting when circumstances that seem so relevant and important at the time of a film’s release just dissolve as the years go by. I didn’t care so much about all of that background information at the time, I just responded to what I saw on the screen, but over the years Contempt has grown increasingly, almost unbearably, moving to me. It’s a shattering portrait of a marriage going wrong, and it cuts very deep, especially during the lengthy and justifiably famous scene between Piccoli and Bardot in their apartment: even if you don’t know that Godard’s own marriage to Anna Karina was coming apart at the time, you can feel it in the action, the movement of the scenes, the interactions that stretch out so painfully but majestically, like a piece of tragic music. Contempt is also a lament for a kind of cinema that was disappearing at the time, embodied by Fritz Lang and the impossible adaptation of The Odyssey that he’s directing. And it is a profound cinematic encounter with eternity, in which both the lost marriage and the cinema seem to dissolve. It’s one of the most frightening great films ever made."