"I recently picked up Jean Vigo's dreamy 1934 story of a honeymoon couple heading to Paris on a barge. It's still startling and would have been way out on its own in 1934. Also included on the Artificial Eye DVD is his earlier short Zéro de conduite which was banned for years in France. An anarchic tale of kids taking over a boarding school. You can see how much Truffaut picked up from here and it was a direct influence on the 60s Lindsay Anderson film If. Vigo died young and L'Atalante was his only complete feature."

"A great mockumentary about a reunion of three folk bands that’s gently observed but also spot-on. I love how it quietly gets behind the scenes into the backbiting and the jealousy that leads up to their reunion concert, and I especially love the attitudes towards the shiny sellouts. The characters are so well done, too – the troubled former couple, the old-school trio, the Folksmen – but not every moment is mined for gags, which is what makes it work. You can tell everyone taking part genuinely loves music, and that’s why Christopher Guest always gets it right."

"The first Bowie album I got into and still my favourite just because it’s got so many good songs. It’s quite a long album, and he went so many different places afterwards, but that kind of version of him is the one I can most identify with. It’s almost like a greatest hits in itself with an unbelievable number of proper classics on it! One of my favourite ones is 'Kooks', which is about having a kid and being a couple of kooky and alternative parents and wondering how the fuck you’re going to bring it up."

"Dirty and loud, this film put a face to the music that represented the ultimate freedom from the suburbs. Pre-YouTube, footage of these bands was super hard to come by. There were only a couple videotapes floating around… and once in a while, you could see something truly outré on “120 Minutes”… but in truth, if you weren’t in LA/NY/DC, you missed out on most of the scene. Like water to the desert, Penelope Spheeris’s film brought the culture into our lives. And shortly thereafter, I had myself a hideous painted leather jacket — just like Darby Crash."