"… the first time I owned an album of my very own. I didn't pay for it with my pocket money, my sister Clare got given it by a boyfriend and she passed it on to me immediately. The Hipgnosis cover with the black and gold solarisation and the amp - it's a classic record sleeve. It's just a really brilliant album, a bridging album between the Tyrannosaurus Rex years and the full-on commerciality of Fly, and 'Telegram Sam' and 'Hot Love'. There's a great poster of Marc looking supercool in his Maida Vale flat with a mirror in the shape of a guitar, and illustrations of him by George Underwood, who famously went to school with David Bowie and punched him in the eye, causing 'the Bowie eye'."

"I love this album. We used to play these tunes in The Idle Race; about two or three songs off that album. For about a year we did them and they were so good to play. That big, rough r'n'b sound. I’ve actually recorded ‘Mercy, Mercy’ on my new album, Longwave. It’s a version like we used to do it – just two guitars, drums and bass and background shouting. It sounds like the old record, really. I think that sound was important back then. There was a lot of r'n'b going on. Obviously, you had The Spencer Davis Group with Steve Winwood, who I love – he’s a brilliant guy. He’s one guy I’d like to work with one day. I haven’t seen him for a few years but we used to hang out a bit."

"Very funny, again. I just think it’s really funny, that film. “I had an apple pie with cheese — I thought that was great choice.” It’s a really good film to like if you’re interested in directing, ’cause it’s full of so many brilliant directorial flourishes: it’s like an Italian horror film, but really funny. There are sort of Mike Nichols scenes in there, with all the Bava camerawork and the Godard stuff. And just [De Niro] — his performance. And how subjective it is — how it channels all that Hitchcock stuff with something that’s more docuemntary and more real. I know [Scorsese] always talks about The Wrong Man in relation to it and it would have been interesting to see what Hitchcock had done if he’d done more stuff on location."

"This is maybe my second favorite doc of all time. It’s a PBS American Masters on David Geffen. He is the single most successful entrepreneur ever in the entertainment business. This guy is just brilliant, has had a really interesting life and done so much, every big cultural event. I’ve seen it a hundred times and really think that if you’re interested in entering or being an artist in the film industry it’s really important to understand the business, and a film like this makes you feel like you have a book that no one else has. He’s the smartest businessman to have entered the art world, in my opinion. He’s almost got the soul of an artist, but his Picasso-like skill is for the business of entertainment. It’s insanely fascinating."

"When I was at school, Raymond Pettibon was one of my favourite artists. I'm not into comic books and I don't really like comic book artwork for records and some people probably would describe Raymond Pettibon in that style. And yet despite that, he just has something else. He has ideas. That particular picture on the cover of Goo was an image I was familiar with before I even knew who Sonic Youth were, which is probably a bit unusual. I came across it in one of his books. As a sixteen-year-old there were so many of his images, especially when those images included text, that really sparked off my thoughts. I found them really evocative. Sonic Youth are obviously a brilliant band but I only came to learn that a lot later."