"He was working with a lot of the young rappers, like Easy Mo Bee. They were laying down hip-hop drums and a few chords and apparently Miles would just improvise over the top and they'd add the vocals. That's a fabulous record, primarily because Miles sounds like he's really enjoying himself. He's more inventive on that album. He's getting more involved than on some of the albums that came before that. I saw him play live at the Hammersmith Odeon in the early 1980s and all he was doing was orchestrating. He'd stand up and play a little riff and then point at the drummer, who'd do a 15-minute solo. He was wearing a baseball hat on and was bent down and you couldn't see his face. Another one-minute solo, then point to the guitar player. The show went a bit like that. But everything he did play was well worth the entrance price. He plays great on Doo Bop. It was his last album. He was doing painting at the time, but he was really into working with these young guys and they were in awe of him. This was their dedication to him. The lyrics are all about how brilliant he is. Miles rose to the occasion and showed his chops. Every note is perfect. I've grown into jazz over the years, but it took me a bit of time to appreciate it."

"My personal favorite comedy growing up, and something that really influenced me, was Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, directed by Tim Burton. I love this movie because Paul Reubens is just brilliant; [he] plays this character Pee-wee Herman, and the creativity that’s put into this movie, it was like, what else can you add to make this movie [funnier]? Just the opening shot of him waking up, and there’s like a Rube Goldberg contraption of how he makes toast and breakfast in the morning; he drops a ping-pong ball, it hits a candle that turns on and burns a rope that breaks and swings a hammer… It was so creative. I remember being a kid, I watched that movie probably 300 times. I memorized it. I used to do the voice; I had to stop doing it. It’s a movie, to me, about how far can you dream. Someone steals his bike, and he tries to get his bike back, and through this adventure he ends up pitching his story to a movie studio, which makes his adventure into a feature film at the end. It’s just great that he thought this movie up and wrote it, with Phil Hartman, who was one of my favorites from Saturday Night Live. It’s for kids, but it’s for adults. He’s just such a good actor in this movie – Paul Reubens should have gotten an Oscar for this."

"I would probably say À ma soeur!, the Catherine Breillat film. If you could put that title instead of Fat Girl. I’m just kidding. I don’t really like saying my movie is related to that. I do think Catherine Breillat is brilliant and her movies have so much psychological weight to them. Those two sisters, they’re just, like, titanic, in terms of the conflict between them. The sexual scene with the boy is one of the most charged, terrifying, strange, impossible-to-describe scenes ever, that long take. The sort of depth of… Anaïs? The main girl? Just the depth of her look, how significant her neutral look and gaze is. Her stare is one of the best stares ever. And I stole the swimsuit from that movie and put it in my movie. I just completely stole the lime green one-piece and put it in my movie. I just love Catherine Breillat. I just think she’s incredibly smart. It’s very exciting, and it’s a sign of a really incredible director to show how much tension and tone can be wrought out of a scene of a younger sister staring out of her covers at her older sister from the bed across the room. It’s kind of incredible how powerful and charged that movie feels before it becomes insane at the end. To me, the brutality and shock of the ending, I was feeling throughout the entire movie. It’s just crazy when it shows up literally."

"I had to. I mean, how do you pick one? Syd Barrett, brilliant. One thing he did which just knocked me out, at a very early gig - and we thought we’d imagined it because we were stoned but we read about it in a magazine - in those days a lot of the bands would do an hour set, and then maybe the drummer would do a half-hour drum solo while the others went off to do drugs, or they’d all go off and we’d all be sitting around for half an hour because we’d do drugs. And then they’d come back. So, anyway, they went off, and we thought, “Oh no, drum solo, I guess it’s time to do drugs”. And they changed into workman’s outfits and old macs and one by one they all came back. One of them brought some wood, another one had a toolbox, another one had a flask and tea-cups, and the floor of the stage was miked. They made themselves things to sit on, and it was all done rhythmically, creating this piece of musique concrète. They made a table and sets of chairs, then sat down, turned on a transistor radio and drank cups of tea! Then they left and came back on as Pink Floyd! I was thinking, “Did I really just see that?”, and for years thought we’d imagined it. And we didn’t, it really happened."

"I've been a fan of his since the start, when I heard ‘Didgeridoo'... At our age it was an interesting time, because it was the start of dance culture as we know it, but also I was young enough when I first heard it that I didn't differentiate between hearing a Mary Chain song or hearing an Orb song or a KLF song or a Loop song. I guess of all the bands or musicians that I heard around that first wave of electronic music, I think Richard James is the guy that's continued and kept a high standard and evolved what he did. I mean, that Richard D James record, if you went and listened to half of the brand new IDM vomit they'd be shitty copies of that. What makes his music is so special is that as well as being amazing at concocting interesting sounds and rhythms, he's also musically always doing something brilliant. The piano songs on the Drukqs album are unbelievable. Talking about that, it's completely irrelevant to this, but the most annoyed I've ever got at a music review is the review of Drukqs in Uncut where the journalist said there's no point in making solo piano music because you'd never do anything as good as Satie or Chopin. Well let's just fucking go home then! But anyway. To be able to marry the playfulness with the beauty and the melancholic element, that's just incredible."

"I love this record. Of course Bob Dylan is a genius, and most of the acknowledgements of Dylan are for his compositions. These tracks, many of them I think are traditional songs, there's one or two originals. I love listening to this all the way through. His extraordinary rendition of 'The House Of The Rising Sun' is somehow overlooked. It amazes me. I know the Animals' one is brilliant, but I prefer the Dylan one, because it just tears your heart open. You really get a strong sense of the meaning of the lyric when Dylan does it, the melancholy of it. I think the reason why I love it is, you get the sense of the beginning of something. You know, this guy's gonna have a future. The simplicity of it, as well. It's just this guy with a harmonica and a guitar, yet it's profound. And I think credit has to be given to [producer] John Hammond as well, who's one of my great heroes. What a guy. A champion of African American music, yet at the same time, a champion of bringing white music and black music together. That to me is the message of the last century, more than anything. It's not separating the two, it's what they did together. You wouldn't have a job, and probably I wouldn't [laughs], without that marriage, because rock music wouldn't have happened without it, it wouldn't even exist."

"Nineties hip-hop has never been bettered for me. I kind of lost interest in the eighties when electro started morphing into hip-hop. It got a bit clunky for me as it tried to sound more real, it sounded clumsier. By the time you get to the nineties, you had a mutation of what's real. The production on The Infamous – sonically it's just genius. It's a shame some of the lyrics are so offensive as it detracts from how good the music is. It's brilliant soundtrack music – it carries on the thread for me of the stomach knot for me, from John Carpenter. I don't know why they were so quick to move on from the sound of The Infamous. I suppose the royalties thing is huge in hip-hop, now everybody buys an off-the-shelf keyboard and has a stab at it to avoid having to clear samples. But it doesn't sound the same. It was hard to pick one. When I got ousted from The Verve in 1995, I stumbled on Tical by Method Man. That's definitely my favourite Wu-Tang record, probably because it was my first. The production doesn't bear any relation to anything I'd heard before. You could draw a parallel with Tom Waits – it's from another world really. That one needed perseverance as well. It sounds shit at first, but then it reveals itself."

"This is extremely gloomy music, but an absolutely brilliant album. I first heard it in the 80s. It was the kind of thing I always listened to at the end of the day, when you're a bit pissed and in bed and have probably smoked a bit more weed than you should have done. It's such a powerful record. It's got so many different moods in it and it takes you from melancholy to sheer triumph, in a way. The journey along the way, and the performance of Mark Hollis, is so moving, and I think the other musicians on board have great empathy for that and it all fits into place. It really does sound like they were all sat in the studio and said okay, we're all really good at this, let's do something that makes that obvious. And I think it does. I knew Ed Hollis, Mark Hollis's brother, because he came in and produced 'Love Song' for The Damned. And of course we knew him because he was the manager of Eddie & The Hot Rods, so we were already in the loop. But I didn't really bother with Talk Talk until this record came out and someone said have you heard this? And it just immediately resonated. I thought oh, I like this; I want more of it. Now I find I have to be in the right mood to listen to it; reflective, you might say."

"As a drummer, Klaus Dinger was important to me: [he taught me] how to make one riff last a lifetime! It's a great riff though, don't get me wrong. Neu! was absolutely brilliant; it's another record where the first time you buy it and put it on, you think 'I've never heard anything like this before'. I was into Krautrock and that's why I bought it - I bought anything that came out of Germany - but Neu! were just completely out there. I had no idea who was in the band, there was just a big 'Neu!' image on the front… it was striking, kind of punk. The way that they used cut up music, and bits of ambient sound… as soon as I heard it, I thought 'If I ever start a band, I'd like them to sound a bit like this - as adventurous as this'. A lot of Krautrock was trying to plough its own furrow, but there were other bits that were trying to Germanize Western things. And the odd thing about it is, I never knew that Michael Rother lived in Wilmslow for a time - which is just around the corner from me - in the 70's. I was watching a Krautrock documentary and he was saying: “I've always been surrounded by flowing water, there's always been a river - the Rhine, the Elbe, the Bollin.” And I said: “Hang on, did he just say the Bollin!? That's just down the road!”"

"Let’s do Preston Sturges and the greatest comedy of all. This film hasn’t aged a day from 1941 when it came out; it’s amazing — especially with Hollywood in mind. It’s the ultimate inside Hollywood movie. It’s about a guy searching for meaning in his art who’s had all this success in Hollywood… The human dynamics of it are very true to life. I mean, it’s a comedy and it’s all pitched at that point, but Preston Sturges was such the master of dialogue and delivery that the whole tone and pitch of it is totally unique. It’s amazingly contemporary. This character’s desires and the timeless subject of, say, art versus commerce is one of the best film depictions of that you could ever find — and in a very comedic way. He has a project that the studio doesn’t want him to make about homelessness — this is coming out of the Depression — and he’s a spoiled rich guy and he has a project he wants to make. Of course, the Coens made a film with that name, O Brother, Where Art Thou? That’s where that comes from. And it’s kind of a ridiculous desire to say something that has social significance and meaning about suffering and all that stuff, but he’s really kind of desperate to make a comedy. He ends up on a chain gang by a series of misadventures… So he really is suffering. It’s just a brilliant movie and surprisingly contemporary."