"I would say my number one movie: Purple Rain. I could probably teach a semester of film studies on the first eight minutes of Purple Rain. And if you watch that first eight minutes, you’re going to see why, because the way the music — it’s like the extended version of “Let’s Go Crazy” — the way it’s cut, continuity completely goes out the window. You’ll be on stage with Prince, but then you’ll cut and you’ll see him getting ready to go on stage, then you’ll see him at his house, blowing out candles. Then you see him on his motorcycle coming to the club, cuts to him on stage in the club, cuts to Apollonia coming into town… By the end of that eight minutes, you know everybody’s character, you know their relationship to each other, and the music never stopped. It’s a dizzying… I think you see three tongues within the first eight minutes. You know, Apollonia’s boobs were like an atom bomb going off in my world, because up until that moment, I wanted to marry women, like, “I like that girl. I would want her to be my wife and have kids with her.” But then I saw Apollonia, and I was like, “I have thoughts now in my head that I didn’t have before, and feelings that I’ve never had before!” The same poster that I got at a fair in Vallejo, California of Apollonia in a bikini is up on my wall here in my office, and people still come in here and go, “Damn, I had that poster on my wall!”"

"Jonathan Richman sounded a bit like Lou Reed. The songs were fantastic. The only place you could buy that album was the Rock On store in Camden Town. I think everybody, including John Rotten and all of the Pistols, had been down there at some point to buy it. Anybody that later got into the punk rock scene had bought this record. It still sounds really good. John Cale produced it. It's under-produced if anything, which is what's so good about it. His voice is great. American punk rock was completely different from the London scene – you had Richard Hell & the Voidoids and Television and that, and it all seemed a bit arty. But this was four college kids from California who had got together and made a dark record. It sounds like a guy who's had his heart broken. It's a romantic punk record, really. 'Roadrunner' is the one everybody learnt when they were rehearsing or trying to get into a band. The way he sang, he just sort of threw it away. I can't really think of anybody who'd done it like that before. The solos were great, just one or two notes. Very simple stuff, which was what appealed to the punks. The whole punk thing was about stripping things down because people couldn't play very well. Get the band first and worry about the music later. I saw Jonathan Richman last year doing a festival somewhere, just him and a drummer. He's the only person I know who tells the sound guy to turn it down. But back then he was streets ahead of everyone."