"It's just a gorgeous record with, again, a big heart in the middle of it. If you were to choose a tune to listen to, I'd listen to 'Lullaby' at the end of the record. Rolf Klausener's mother escaped an abusive childhood in Honduras. Her mother died in childbirth, and as she was brought up, she was abused, and she made an escape which involved crossing a swollen river, where she was rescued from drowning by a complete stranger whose face she never saw. He only found this out because his father died unexpectedly young and he realised he wanted to know more about his dad. He thought he should interview his mother because he didn't remember much about him. Then all this stuff came pouring out. Glory Hope Mountain is kind of a westernisation of his mother's name, Gloria Esperanza Montoya, and on the front sleeve there's a very saucy picture of a young woman. That's his mother. It was sent to me from Bella Union as part of my radio programme for Radio 6 Music. I've read a million promo stickers, as I'm sure you have, and they nearly always say fucking ""eclectic"" right? But the first time I saw this album, I thought this is about something, you know, and I thought it was such a bold step. It transfixed me when I first listened. I loved it so much that I invited The Acorn to tour with us in Europe, and they did. I should have picked an older, uglier band. We got absolutely no attention from women [laughs]. We became really good pals. Just really beautiful people, and an absolutely wonderful record. Just to finish what I was saying about Lullaby, he wrote it from the point of view of his grandma to his infant mother, and the lyrics are astonishing. Casey Mecija provides vocals for it – just such a beautiful voice. But the lyrics are: ""'Cause the sun set down on me You turn your head and slowly start to breathe Like the common bonds on carbon, buried deep I'm the shadow of the long forgotten dream... And the promises I never got to keep Though your toes grow colder as you sleep The blood runs through your heart with every beat… But I, I will wash over you I know your heart is true Little mountain of mine"" It's unbelievable, it is so touching, just beautiful. I challenge anyone with a beating heart not to have it broken with it. The whole album is brilliant."

"Spike Lee’s third film. I had just started doing films in high school and Do the Right Thing came out, and there was just this burst of creativity in a drama, of creative energy, and also just the social commentary, and Spike being in it, and the music, and the color, the production design. Then I read the book on the making of it. I read the book that he wrote for She’s Gotta Have It. I really became, like, a Spike Lee connoisseur, you know? But again, just to kind of open my eyes, it took me from kind of like what we were talking about before, like the shiny effects, you know, that kid of shiny object interest of childhood, to movies that can really make you think, and make you talk, make you think about what is going on, and his social commentary really affected me. It really took me from kind of like a Spielberg/Lucas type of filmmaker toward a more socially conscious filmmaker. I actually did a film that was very inspired by Do the Right Thing called Gabriel’s Dream that never got distributed. But it was about these workers in a particularly hot summer in Maryland, and they were trying to get A/C in their factory, and that was basically the story. Like, workers’ rights. It kind of really took me in a direction that I never thought I would go in. And it never came out, it did some festivals, and we never got distribution for it, this was like early 1990s. But it definitely opened my eyes to the power of cinema as a social statement, as a social tool. And I wrote two or three scripts after that that were very much inspired by Do the Right Thing, kind of touching on social issues. I was really that kind of filmmaker when I was in film school. But then we came up with the idea for Blair Witch and all of a sudden, we became “horror filmmakers.” But still, I love the idea of always having a little bit of the deeper meaning in material. And some films are just for fun and made that way, but there are others where you want to dig a little deeper. If you can get one person coming out of the theater thinking about what happened in the movie, I think it’s great. And Do the Right Thing consumed me. It was such an important film in my upbringing, you know?"

"Sgt Pepper’s was my childhood Beatles record. Again, it’s moving, but in quite an abstract way, just describing what she’s leaving behind. You don’t ever hear where she’s gone or why, but you get these little hints: she’s leaving home after living alone and yet her Mum and Dad are there. It’s all done with McCartney’s jovial style but it’s got this sadness in it, which I think he’s really good at - he’s done it lots of times, with ‘Eleanor Rigby’ being the absolute epitome of it. “But that whole album made an impact on me as a kid. It’s a kind of dark, sickly-feeling album to me. It’s not very comfortable, it’s trippy and weird. You don’t really know where you are with it, it’s colourful, but in a ghoulish way. It’s a scary record for a child, because it’s just so weird. And ‘She’s Leaving Home’ holds you a bit closer than the other songs I think, even though it’s about someone leaving home. I also like the musical elements - the melody and the structure of it. “The Beatles have been an ongoing influence in my life and I think if you like them as a child you’re always going to like them. But the great thing about The Beatles is the breadth and the evolution of their records, if you’re not feeling ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ anymore, you can dip in at different points and find different sides to them. ""There’s so many things they touched on. ‘Helter Skelter’ is basically the whole of The Who’s output in one song; the post-rock elements of ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, that’s a fucking genre now! And they just did it for a laugh and never did it again. There’s so many little flashes like that and more than anything it just makes me feel like it would have been so amazing to have been around in a time when nothing’s been done. “The other great thing about the Beatles was that they put stuff on those records specifically for children, tracks like ‘Octopus’s Garden’. I think that’s something that’s been completely lost now, because children are given adult themes in a friend way now, rather than saying, “Here’s something you might actually like, being a child. Don’t worry about the other stuff.” Although funnily enough, with Get To Heaven we got so many people telling us that their children really liked it. We were really pleased about that - maybe it’s the colourful nature of it. It’s definitely something I want to explore more."