"I saw this movie when it first came out and at that point I’d never see a horror film, believe it or not! I had a girlfriend at the time, she was an anthropology student, and she said, ‘I heard there’s this new film called Night of the Living Dead, c’mon lets go.’ Eventually we left and when we got there the theatre was buzzing before the film even started. And then it starts, and we’re in the cemetery with the brothers and sisters bickering and then the zombie lurches towards them! Some people are screaming, some were saying the lines of the characters and suddenly I was swept into it and jumping and laughing and afraid, and I realised that this guy Romero was incredible. “It also made me realise that with a genre film, as long as it scared you, you could say anything; about politics, about psychology. It made me realise as well that fear is one of the primary thresholds you experience things through. Fear of anything – even sex – is scary! The first time you do it you’re like, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing? Am I going to fail?’ And you get through it and you realise it’s a wonderful thing. That’s what’s great about the horror genre is that you’re getting a load of people together in the cinema at the same place and the same time, having them all experience extreme fear, and come out alive at the end. It’s an uplifting experience and there’s a sense of elation."

"This film takes place in Dijon, France, in the mid-’50s. It is a coming-of-age film about a boy in his early teens named Laurent Chevalier, who is from a bourgeois family. He has two older brothers who are always teasing him and who introduce him to a prostitute for his first sexual experience. Laurent has a beautiful mother and a successful father who is a gynecologist. After getting scarlet fever and discovering he has a heart murmur, Laurent must stay in bed for several months to recover. When he is better, he travels with his mother to a very fancy resort (sanatorium) in France. The second and third acts of the film are about his coming-of-age experiences at the sanatorium with the other young people who are staying there. It is also about him developing a strong personal relationship with his mother. This film is so daring and touches on many taboo issues—it’s astonishing that it could be made then (1971) and even now it would be considered to be pushing too many boundaries. In the end, it’s a beautiful, deep love story between adolescent children growing up in a privileged life, and about the closest relationship between a mother and son. I wish more films today could push boundaries like Louis Malle did in Murmur of the Heart. This film reassured me how important it is to push boundaries and to pursue issues that are considered by some to be untouchable. It is a truly inspirational film."

"This takes me back to when we were on tour in America with The Bends, and we had all our equipment stolen. We only had three days to buy more. I remember Jonny and I travelling into this guitar shop in San Francisco, where I saw this Telecaster Strat I fell in love with, then me, Colin, Jonny, our soundman and our tech hiring this van to drive six hours north. We had only one cassette to play in it, which had Swervedriver's Ejector Seat on one side and Marvin Gaye's What's Going On on the other. I'd never heard it before. I was like, what is this? Oh my God! All I knew about Marvin Gaye was that he'd been involved in Motown. After this, I got trainspotterish about the album, and its band, The Funk Brothers, and how they made music.

This was really influential on the way I made music from that point. Before that, my bands were Pixies, Nirvana, The Posies and other grunge stuff, but I'd more or less reached a saturation point with all that by 1995. Hearing What's Going On? was like suddenly hearing music in five dimensions; it really made me think about how I wanted to contribute sonically to OK Computer. I thought 'Inner City Blues' was the greatest song I'd ever heard in my life, and it's still up there for me. This music felt like truth. It elevated and transported me. It was music that made me love the music I was trying to make."

"It’s virtually impossible to find their early records. This particular record – their first album – I’ve tried to play on radio shows before, but it’s difficult because the language that they use is banned on radio. They use words that were then commonplace to describe their brothers and sisters, but are now not seen in the same way. Words that were in common usage in the sixties and now are not and for very good reason. But then they carried a very different potency. The thing I love about The Last Poets is that they are very direct, they pull no punches, they’re speaking to their community in way that Gil Scott-Heron did a lot. He also wasn’t afraid to say exactly how he felt about how his community was living. And The Last Poets did that too, with rhythmical words set to a very simple beat, in this case played on congas. One of their later albums even had Jimi Hendrix on it, and Buddy Miles. But this is the rawest, just a group of voices. They were the forerunners of rap. Using voices in unison to underline phrases and to make certain phrases more forceful, and all of this to an infectious groove. That’s all of what I love about rap music and urban poetry. It became part of what Underworld assimilated in our eclectic nature. The Last Poets throw the gauntlet down. If you want to write about the urban condition, there’s your benchmark. I can’t come close."