"This is the record that made me a guitar player. I got given a guitar aged nine and had been taught a couple of things on it, but it’d basically stayed propped against the corner of the room and not used that much… until I first heard The Smiths when I was 13. It was just like, ‘This is what I want to do – I’m doing this! I’m going to be a guitarist in a band!’ “Johnny Marr was like a surrogate guitar teacher right through my early teens - 13, 14, 15 years old - to when I met Mark Gardener at school. We became mates because he heard I could play the riff off Bigmouth Strikes Again and asked me to show him. "That’s how we became friends, so Ride’s got a lot to thank The Smiths for. I still find some of Johnny Marr’s playing totally baffling, like those swoopy lead parts on How Soon Is Now?.”"

"This is like a greatest hits-type thing, and I picked it up at a record fair when I was about 14. Me and my dad would go to record fairs in Oxford Town Hall, and I’d save up and buy a couple of records each time. “In those days, there was no way of hearing a record without buying it, so a lot of the time you’d buy something based on the sleeve or just based on a recommendation, and I think I bought this because of the sleeve. “I’d heard that The Who were a good band but – when I listened to this - I discovered a whole new level of guitar sonics. Everything about the violence of Pete Townshend’s guitar playing really affected me. He changed the rules of what a solo could be… just some noise could be a solo and, obviously, that became a big part of Ride, because we were all about the noise being an instrument.”"

"Most of my favorite films are those in which the lead character is in every scene of the film. When I was a teenager I saw Blow-Up, The Graduate, and Midnight Cowboy at a revival art-house cinema, and these films had an enormous impact on me. I’ve collected Criterion editions since the laserdisc days, and my favorite from that time was the Midnight Cowboy disc, with John Schlesinger’s commentary. But having two out of the three films available now on Criterion Blu-ray is great. I love the package design and transfer of the Blow-Up disc, and the scene in the park where David Hemmings stalks the couple with his camera really comes to life with the new transfer—it’s maybe my favorite scene in any film ever made. And what can I say about The Graduate except that it’s the one film I never tire of seeing? I love all the extras and screen tests on the disc."

"Most of my favorite films are those in which the lead character is in every scene of the film. When I was a teenager I saw Blow-Up, The Graduate, and Midnight Cowboy at a revival art-house cinema, and these films had an enormous impact on me. I’ve collected Criterion editions since the laserdisc days, and my favorite from that time was the Midnight Cowboy disc, with John Schlesinger’s commentary. But having two out of the three films available now on Criterion Blu-ray is great. I love the package design and transfer of the Blow-Up disc, and the scene in the park where David Hemmings stalks the couple with his camera really comes to life with the new transfer—it’s maybe my favorite scene in any film ever made. And what can I say about The Graduate except that it’s the one film I never tire of seeing? I love all the extras and screen tests on the disc."

"This is a really obscure one, but there’s a really weird French-Canadian movie called Leolo. Roger Ebert loved it. He gave it a four-star review when it came out. The filmmaker, Jean-Claude Lauzon… He made two movies and then he died. It’s a really tragic story. It’s this surreal, messed-up story about a kid whose family is going insane, and so he comes up with these fantastical stories to escape from his world. I saw that movie when I was in high school, and it just made such an impression on me because of the way it balanced humor and absurdity, and surrealism, and then just tragedy. It’s great. I should probably see it again. I haven’t seen it in a couple of years, so I want to make sure it still stands up. That movie is another very particularly strange coming-of-age movie that will always be a reference for me."