"We liked Free – very bluesy, with a lot of soul. There was a time when there was this thing called Freemania, when they were the biggest thing since sliced bread. They were a bit Led Zeppelinish – brilliant musicians, and Paul Rodgers was a white guy who sounded black. They were all great at what they did. This album didn’t influence me so much, but it influenced the band the other guys were in, Sob. They named the band after this album. They were a very bluesy outfit before Paul Quinn and I joined the band and it became Son of a Bitch, then Saxon – our old band, Coast, was more proggy. So this album became part of my listening cycle."

"They were on Casablanca Records. They were the yin to Kiss’s yang. Kiss were dressed up in black and Angel were in white. They had this remarkable guitar player called Punky Meadows who Frank Zappa actually made fun of in songs. But he had some remarkable songs like Tower and Any Way You Want. They were almost proggish to a degree, but really great songs. I always wondered about doing a cover of the song Tower. The singer had this really weird voice. You have to be super open-minded to appreciate it because he has such a super-fast vibrato, and a lot of people won’t find that appealing. But they were one of my favourite bands growing up."

"It was a struggle for me to choose just one Louis Malle film, so I chose two to count as one. This one is particularly exceptional, thanks in part to the amazing performance by Maurice Ronet. Pushed by Malle to lose forty pounds, Ronet gave a hard, hopeless portrayal of a despondent and suicidal man saying good-bye to his disdainful and shallow youth. Though he originally shot the film in color, Malle switched to black and white to more accurately depict the subject matter. Listening to the commentary, I learned that Malle used this film as a sort of exorcism for himself, feeling that he had already done everything at such a young age. Deeply personal, it was his favorite of his own films."