"I wish young actors and actresses were better versed in the work of Fields, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and even lower-brow comics like the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Jerry Lewis. Actors can partly cultivate a sense of humor from observing and mimicking our forebears. W. C. Fields makes me laugh more than any other film actor. His performances seem effortless, as if Fields is just doing Fields, but he deserves more credit than that. He constructed and honed his character over a twenty-year stage career. That character, known in The Bank Dick as Egbert Sousé, is the cinematic progenitor of a comic archetype: the lazy, drunken misanthrope. Fields wasn’t the innovator that Chaplin or Keaton was, of course, and in fact, his movies are not great. They’re flimsy vehicles for his routines. But I’ve also come to believe that’s part of the joke. “Can you believe they made a whole movie about this guy?” The Bank Dick also features several great comic character actors, such as Franklin Pangborn, Grady Sutton (as Og Oggilby), and Shemp Howard. I wanted to put Contempt on my list but Godard never put Shemp in a movie, know what I’m saying?"

"It was his first great album. All of his early albums have their own sound, and the atmosphere and some kind of other-worldly quality is what first grabbed me. Hunky Dory was where his lyrics got much better. The songs sound very simple, but in terms of the chords they are really complex. ‘Changes’ has got lots of weird things going on but it never sounds muso. It’s his first classic album. What are the standout tracks? It’s easier to say the ones that aren’t. Every day of my life I sing them. ‘Kooks’, ‘Changes’ and ‘Bewlay Brothers’ are my favourites. I like ‘Andy Warhol’ and ‘Queen Bitch’, but I think those are the two that don’t stack up as much. Charisma goes a long way – so people have told me anyway. Even now he doesn’t overdo it. I saw it in a shop in Norris Green, and I used to stare at it for ages, it wasn’t a sexual thing, but I couldn’t stop being lost in the world of his music. It was spiritual, there was nothing else I thought about. It was Bowie was who got me interested in music, then I got into the Velvets and Iggy."

"I’m sure a lot of people say this one. As a kid, the toys, the action figures, being able to watch the three movies, and being able to watch them over and over, and then so many years later, they came out with the new ones. And now they going to make more. It was a big movie growing up. As a kid, again, the toys — I go back and watch some of those old commercials for [putting on his announcer voice] “The Millennium Falcon!” it just gives me goosebumps and reminds me of my childhood. Growing up, I didn’t get any of the toys; my family couldn’t afford to buy them. But what was awesome was my friend, he had two brothers, and they all wanted the same Star Wars toys, so their parents would get them three TIE fighters, or three Death Star sets. So on Christmas, I’d open up my presents, run to my friend’s house, and they would get every single Star Wars thing, and I could play with them. And then they got into GI Joe, and they had the big hovercraft, and the space shuttle, it was awesome. Anyway, the combination of the movies and the toys makes it a classic for me."

"Tonto's Expanding Head Band were very early synth adopters. Tonto was an acronym for The Original New Timbral Orchestra which was a reference to what they worked on: the biggest polyphonic analogue synth in the world. Tonto was almost like a cockpit of synths arranged in a horseshoe shape. When they played it, they were inside the machine. Zero Time was hugely influential, most notably on Stevie Wonder who heard it, freaked out and asked them to produce his records. They ended up doing Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness' First Finale. They also did a load of Isley Brothers records, including 3 + 3. Zero Time borders on New Age in a way. I'd never really heard music like this before – totally instrumental, the whole record composed on synths. I saw them live when they played at the Big Chill festival in 2006. I hadn't known they were playing [a line-up consisting of the band's Malcolm Cecil and his son, DJ Moonpup, with a portable version of Tonto performed]. It was amazing, even if it was a bit odd because they interspersed songs with educational stuff, little bits of interviews with Stevie Wonder and other people they'd worked with. It worked though – what a show!"