"Strangelove — you can watch it again and again. Brilliant. To me, maybe the funniest movie ever made. Huge variety in the styles of the movie. Some of it’s shot like cinéma vérité documentary. Some of it’s very stylized. The mise en scène changes radically. When you’re in the bomber it’s hand-held — it might as well be Richie Leacock, or one of the Pennebakers making a movie; that’s how free-form it is. Totally realistic, even though you have Slim Pickens as the pilot of the jet that’s taking the atomic bomb to Russia. He’s hilarious, and yet you have a sense of this is really what it looks like — what their equipment looks like, what the gauges and the codes look like. They do a really funny sequence where they open up their survival box and there’s a condom, and there’s a 45, and it’s totally believable. And of course it ends with Slim Pickens riding the atomic bomb down like a wild horse toward Russia, and the world ending. And Sterling Hayden, absolutely hilarious throughout the movie, and Sellers playing five parts, I think. The scenes between him and Sterling Hayden, where he’s the British officer who’s been assigned to this airbase and Sterling Hayden is completely wacko and is convinced that they’re stealing his precious bodily fluids, because when he had sex he felt depleted. [Laughs]."

"The great British director Lindsay Anderson died 20 years ago and he only made five or six films, but they’re all very interesting, and I think his most famous is called If… It’s the film Malcolm McDowell did before A Clockwork Orange, and it’s kind of the ultimate teenage movie. It’s beautiful and very radical. It won Cannes that year, and it’s very much of its time, the ’60s, and Malcolm McDowell is brilliant in it. It’s the ultimate teen rebellion movie — and I like that genre — but it’s also very poetic, almost Brechtian, and there’s almost fantasy elements to it. Like, there’s this woman in the movie who might not even be real. It’s filmed in color and there are sections that are black-and-white and it’s kind of amazing. It’s the first film of a trilogy too. Malcolm McDowell’s character’s name is Mick Travis, and so a few years later, they did a film called O Lucky Man! and then ten years later they did Britannia Hospital together, Lindsay Anderson and Malcolm McDowell. So it’s one of the greater film trilogies in my opinion… It’s definitely worth watching. It used to be a bigger cult film in the ’70s and the ’80s, but I see it’s falling off. I don’t know if young people are watching it the way they used to."

"I was researching Gene Vincent online and that brought me to Ian Dury’s song 'Sweet Gene Vincent'. I was not really familiar with it at that point. I knew his hits and I’d seen him on TV and stuff, but I’d never really connected with his music, though I respect him enormously. I was reading up on him and stumbled onto the fact that he had this son, Baxter Dury, who also does music. I checked out one song on YouTube and went, ‘Oh this is right up my alley’ and I immediately downloaded the whole record. I’ve probably listened to it 75 times in the past two months. It’s become a very important record to me. There’s a variety of things I like about it. I would say, his personality comes through the music. It’s not pretentious. You just have a sense of who he is. I love the dry, minimalist production. I like records without too much ambience on the instruments. I associate dry records with The White Album. He also has this lovely rich, lower voice and that great accent. I’m a fan of that accent from when I worked with Eddie Argos and Art Brut. I find it a pleasant tone. For a British person, accents carry baggage, but not for me. It’s all connected to you people and your culture on the island there."