"Varese is a universe. A dense universe of objects colliding, crystallising, dissipating and obliterating. I feel like I can relate to what I know of his temperament as well. As well as his obsession with the desert and need to rid himself of the historical baggage of the past is something I can relate to. That guy for me is the origin of a lot of ideas that I'm excited about. It's hard to even talk about him. You know when you've sat with someone for so long that it's difficult to even begin to say. He was one of the first major composers who transitioned into more of a sound artist. As people have said, he kind of liberated sound from the familiar tropes of Western music and turned sound into this absolute state. An appreciation of sound as object. Sound as environment or experience. So, he's that guy. He's someone who, as I grew up, getting into composition and trying to find someone who I can relate to because I love the music but the culture of classical music is stuffy and boring. And I don't give a shit about it. But he was such an intense, probably manic depressive, obsessive-compulsive, beautiful, frustrated, angry, passionate person – and all this stuff came through his music. And I love him for that. He came out of the whole Romantic orchestral universe, and this was pre-electronic age. So he was surrounded by Stravinsky, Debussy, these major models as far as orchestral writing goes. But there wasn't anyone who was taking that model, freezing it and laying to waste the baggage of history that comes with along with that music. He was able to erase all of that and push the idea of orchestral writing forward. If he was alive today, that's a question I would ask him – where are you coming from? Like Feldman though, he's very intuitive in his writing, so he just trusted himself."

"This was a difficult choice. I did want something that was a disco album and could have gone for The Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever - you don’t get much better than the songs on that particular album. But then I thought about Michael Jackson and what he did and how he changed things. Off The Wall is Quincy [Jones] at the height of his powers producing Michael Jackson as he is coming of age. Michael had the most amazing voice and a sense of rhythm that no-one had ever heard before. It’s really something. I listened to it about two or three months ago for the first time in quite a while and it is flawless. Off The Wall was the sound of [New York super-club] Studio 54. I was too young to go to Studio 54 when it first opened but I did go later when they reopened it briefly at the beginning of the eighties. I stood in the same room just imagining what it would have been like - it would have been a lot more fun in 1977. So, that album, which to me is a more interesting album than Thriller (although again another really great album), captured the spirit of a generation and moved dance music somewhere. This discussion could go on for hours if we had time, about what happened with disco and funk, bands like Chic and Sister Sledge who I’m obviously a huge fan of, but, for me, Off The Wall was the album that defined that period."

"I’m taking you in a slightly different direction now, and I’m going to throw down Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. To me, as an actor, and as a lover and proponent of independent film, what Kathryn Bigelow and Jeremy Renner were able to do on a budget… The storytelling in this movie is sublime. I would have a hard time putting any performance by a male actor above the beautifully nuanced, incredibly layered performance that Jeremy Renner gives in this movie. Yes, he was nominated; I still don’t think he gets enough credit for this performance. Maybe it’s my place in life, maybe it’s the age I was when I saw the film, maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been frustrated with the lack of war films coming out at a time when America was at war and these stories needed to be told. I still feel like they need to be told and aren’t necessarily being told the right way. The Hurt Locker, to me, is as perfect a film as you can make. And Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty — those three characters, gosh… That movie blows me away."