"I was listening to this all through 1977 at a time when I was staying at a flat in Buckingham Gate with Linda, the famous dominatrix – y'know, beating up MPs and all that. And we'd have the New York Dolls in there and various members of the Pistols hanging out. I was staying there because that was where my friend Jordan lived, who worked with Vivienne [Westwood]. Everyone had gone to bed and I had the headphones on listening to The Idiot. I only ever listen to it late at night; I can't listen to it any other time. It's got such a great mood to it. It's a very dark record, the songs are really grinding. I went to do a gig a year or so later in Berlin at a club called SO36 on Oranienstrasse. The Idiot was mixed in Berlin and was the perfect soundtrack to going there when the Wall was still up. It was such a volatile, dangerous place to be. People were disappearing on the way there. We stayed in an old building. The place hadn't changed much since the war, it was still bomb damaged. There were lots of really old ladies with fur coats on going around buying gloves. There seemed to be lots of shops there selling these beautiful handmade gloves. It was in the Turkish quarter and it was quite exciting to go over there and play a gig. It was lost in time, that place. The fans there were quite ahead of the game. They had their own scene. The SO36 club was the reverse of any club we'd ever played. It was completely white with these dazzling neon lights, so you played in this absolutely bright, white room. The crowd were all there with their wedge haircuts, looking all existentialist. And at the end of the show the police tear gassed the place and it came to an abrupt end. That album always reminds me of that time. But every song on that album is a mood; him in a basement breaking out of whatever it was going through at the time. It's the perfect late night record. I met Iggy once at a theatre in Fulham during the Lust for Life tour, I think. He was there rehearsing and we were introduced. The thing that impressed me was that he'd introduce himself off stage: ""Ladies and gentlemen, Iggy Pop."" [Chuckles] He came out and played that night and he had jeans on with a big fur tail hanging out the back and a German helmet and he'd covered himself in paint. Typical Iggy. He was a great performer. Off stage he was very smiley, really sweet to talk to."

"Why, of all the Godards? Well, in part because we all know already that Breathless is one of the most important debuts in the history of cinema, that Band of Outsiders is one hell of a good time, and so on and so forth. And I might have pled the case for another favorite of mine, Alphaville. But, besides all its widescreen majesty, Contempt offers a unique hook for me. From McGilligan’s Lang biography: “At one point Michel Piccoli’s character remarks to Lang how much he and his wife enjoyed watching Rancho Notorious, with Marlene Dietrich, on the television one night. The director forthrightly replies that he himself prefers M. This was also Godard’s joke on himself. Not only did the Cahiers du cinéma crowd champion his Hollywood films above the Berlin ones, but Godard had actually written that M was ‘the least good film of Lang’s.’ ” . . . The world of cinema will forever be indebted to Godard for this Fritz Lang swan song. One elegiac image—just a few moments really, sans dialogue—speaks volumes: The director is seen lighting up a cigarette after others have exited the scene; the camera tracks beside the elder statesman of film as he walks slowly along a street alone, apparently lost in thought. Godard’s camera watches him contemplatively while, in the background, George Delerue’s eloquent score rises on a gorgeous note."

"I was listening to this a lot when Supergrass were making Diamond Hoo Ha over in Berlin. This was the record of that album for me and I was listening to it over and over again. I love the rawness and the vocal performances. When I first heard it, it was unlike anything I'd ever heard before. It was different and I love Tom Verlaine's vocal quality; it's really androgynous and like the male Patti Smith. It had that delivery and I love it. I've never been drawn into the alternate tunings that they used and so I've never delved into that. I'm probably not enough of a nerd about other people's music to do that. But their playing is never pompous or self-indulgent. It wasn't guitar duelling but Television are very sensitive to their instruments. Everything had its place but I think I was drawn to it because of the band I was in. This was what we aspired to in terms of Mick [Quinn] being a brilliant bass player so we let him speak with what he was doing. And you couldn't tread over Danny because he had these amazing bass fills and we had that internal dialogue where everybody got to speak. The best bands are the ones that connect that way and are really on fire when there's that understanding between each other."

"When I was 15 and living in Conneticut, me and my friends started creeping into New York and going to nightclubs in '80, '81. You'd go into New York specifically with the intention of seeing punk rock bands, but a lot of the clubs at the time like Danceteria, Fall Out Shelter, they'd have a punk rock band playing but the DJ before would be playing dub reggae, and the DJ after would be playing early hip hop and electronic music. There was a radio station in New York called WNYU, and they had this three hour long show every afternoon called The New Afternoon Show where they just played new music. I remember them playing 'Der Mussolini' or 'Alles Ist Gut' and having that same reaction as I did to many of my favourite records at the time, which was 'I've never heard anything that sounds like this'. Another reason I loved D.A.F. was because at the time I was living in this very depressing, boring American suburb and I would listen to D.A.F. and imagine how cool it would be to be in Berlin, making weird electronic music with these German guys who only wore black and made songs that, I didn't know what the lyrics were saying, but they sounded cool. I just re-bought Alles Ist Gut, I have the vinyl and CD and just bought the iTunes version of it, and it still sounds amazing."