"I always defend this movie. Some people hate it. I love it, although I am not in a rush to watch the first half again… There is a scene near the end of the film where it is just Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel lounging around their apartment. One of those lazy days you have with a partner. They were a real life couple and that chemistry shoots through to the film. You can tell they are madly in love. I always break into tears at this moment. It puts everything you’ve seen prior into heartbreaking context. The film is a tragedy told in reverse. I think it’s brilliant because by the design of its structure, it makes you think about the tragedy more than if you were just experiencing it in chronological order. Instead of getting to the end of the film and rooting for our protagonist to bash this guys head in, we get to the end of the film and think about how pointless all that pain and violence was and how heartbreaking it is that the violence destroyed this pure love."

"It was great times, I was living in London. Actually, I should probably temper that. It was shit times, but there were one or two great times, it would have been like 2001, living London, having no money. I was working in shitty, office temping jobs, typing numbers in to computers, it was soul destroying and, in the evenings, we’d rehearse but I lived for the weekend. I remember that album came out and there hadn’t been any albums that had come out that had grabbed me that had the combination of being real songs that you could dance to, almost like house music dancing. Around that time, I was taking so much ecstasy and every weekend I’d take a couple of pills and go dancing. That album was a perfect companion for those times. I remember going to see them on my birthday at the Astoria or somewhere like that, and just having such a wicked time. These days I just don’t have the energy to go out dancing, but I loved it, it was truly brilliant. For me it’s still the greatest dance record that I know of."

"I love the production, how they orchestrated those grooves. And Bernard Edwards was a genius bass player, how he came up with that riff that's so often copied. Again, it was just their interpretation of black American funk music. Those guys were supposed to produce the fourth [Gang Of Four] album. And I'd met with him, Bernard Edwards; by the time we'd got to the fourth album, he had died at that point. But I'd met with Nile Rodgers a couple of times, talking about doing a Gang Of Four record. And while that process was going on, Bowie's Let's Dance came out. So not unreasonably they asked for an extra per cent or something, you know, because their stock had just gone up a lot, which I thought was to be expected. But my manager said, ""Oh, we can't do that"", and I feel fairly confident that he was taking a backhander from the people who did do it in the end. I think Hard could have been great. As it was, there were some great songs on that album, but the production doesn't quite get it right."

"I would’ve been fourteen or fifteen years old and in Wisconsin when I heard this. I was in high school and there was somebody who had some shared interests and liked certain kinds of music. I'd never heard the Ramones before and he said I had to hear them, so he let me borrow his Ramones album. This would’ve been around ‘78 or ‘79 maybe. “That’s the strongest memory I have of putting a needle on an album and hearing something I’d never heard before. It was instant and immediate - 'this sounds so good'. I feel like there’s ‘before I heard the Ramones’ and then ‘after I heard the Ramones’ as a point in time for me, because it was the strongest feeling I ever had of hearing something on an album and within a couple of seconds going ‘'Yes, this is amazing.' “I thought, ‘I’m so late to find out about them’ because they had already been around for three or four years, and ‘Wow, what a shame that I found out about them this late, after they’d been around so long.’ Now, looking back at it, I think I caught them pretty early, so that’s good!"

"I think I'd been looking for something like this for ages; something sculpted, but that manages to encompass the violent and everything in between. What I want out of music is everything really, and The Pearl is that. It's quite a dark record in places. It's easy to dismiss it as New Age. I think we're quite lucky at this point in time that people are less concerned about genres than they used to be. Even prog rock is getting a proper analysis now. I finally got around to listening to early Genesis recently and found it wasn't as disgusting as I expected it to be. A lot of music gets dismissed because of how it's tagged. But The Pearl has escaped that really, because of Eno. I was lucky living in St Helens, because it can seem like a bit of a cultural desert, but there were a couple of good resources. There used to be a really good record shop in the market that sold mostly prog rock stuff, but lots of psychedelic stuff, some of Tim Buckley's early stuff and I picked up The Pearl from there. It's amazing."

"This was after a trip to Brazil when I went down there with my mum and my sister and we did some shows. It was an intense moment in my life because Kate had been diagnosed with cancer and her health was pretty precarious. We saw there was a fairly decent run for the next couple of months – the treatment was kind of working and she was feeling relatively okay – so I booked some gigs in Brazil. We proceeded to have one of the most beautiful, decadent, life-affirming trips I ever took in my life, and it was during that little working vacation that I discovered Tim Maia's music, and I've been a fan ever since. He sadly passed away in the 1990s. I love that he represents a real amalgam of so many cultures, as a lot of great Brazilian artists do: African, Spanish, Portuguese, he's just this melting pot of great culture and music and also tremendously individual at the same time. He is certainly well known in large sections of the world, but is a bit of a kept secret in the West."