"I’ll just drop The Weeknd House of Balloons, which I call black Portishead. [Laughs] It’s like, ‘Who is this dude? This can’t be a real person, right?’ That echo just seems like it was recorded—or wasn’t recorded—in some black hole and it was a sound just coming out and it just sucked you in. I could listen to that album 200 million times over and it still sounds fresh every time. “To me, the lyrical content—I don’t know how much it means to him, as far as personally. But, I’m a guy that listens to David Bowie who was like, “Yo, your mom doesn’t know if you are a boy or a girl.” Just saying stuff—shocking, but I don’t know if it’s for shock’s sake. I’m sure he is not trying to do that. But it doesn’t sway me from the music. ‘Yeah, come over, I’ll get you real high and I’ll fuck you and maybe never call you again.’ To me, he is telling a story and we have all seen the movie Seven. That doesn’t mean he beat him and barbed-wired his ankle to a chair and his whole stomach explodes. But it’s fascinating"

"You know what, I think I’m going to swerve The Godfather and go for The King of Comedy. I love Scorsese – I loved Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Mean Streets — they were all really seminal, but I always like a film which is, if not leftfield it’s not obvious Scorsese. He has made less obvious films, like New York, New York or The Last Waltz, which don’t hit the mark for me, but King of Comedy is a gem I think. Curiously enough I was talking about it to my fiancé at the weekend, saying, ‘You’ve got to see it,’ because I think it’s where we are now as a contemporary celebrity-seeking society. There are Rupert Pupkins everywhere now. What they don’t have, that Rupert Pupkin had, is innocence and naivety. When you see the whole Big Brother world, the way that people are cloying to get famous now, that’s Rupert Pupkin. I remember when I first watched The Office I saw a lot of Rupert Pupkin in David Brent. Rupert Pupkin had such likeability whereas Brent is a toad – you want to watch him fail. With Pupkin you want to say, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t go to Jerry Lewis‘ house. Don’t tell Diahnne Abbott you know him — you don’t!'"

"A lot of Todd Haynes’ “Dark Waters” is shot from a distance. Lots of squared-off rectangular compositions, lots of corners and windows, lots of flat tracking shots. The colors are muted, greenish-gray and black. In contrast to the imagery of other films in the good old American David vs. Goliath tradition, Todd sets his hero’s very human struggle with the giant corporation DuPont in a visual framework that always looks a lot more corporate than human. It’s a really interesting choice. The handheld camera-work and bleached deserts of “Erin Brockovich” are as far away as the lighted ceiling squares and shadowy parking garages of “All The President’s Men” — the two most-famous exemplars of this genre. Instead, “Dark Waters” looks expensive, angular, and soft-edged. Even the interpolated closeups of Mark Ruffalo as he uncovers one terrible secret after another never break or mottle the movie’s palette. If it’s not stretching the point, “Dark Waters” looks a bit like it was shot on, well, Teflon. It’s a chilly, chilling approach to a drawn-out, turbulent, often soul-crushing struggle. But it makes perfect sense, considering the size and character of the corporate culture Mark’s Robert Bilott both works in and pits himself again. He’s not building a lawsuit house by house from behind the wheel of a pickup truck; he’s a corporate lawyer pursuing a huge corporation from expensive corporate offices. And whenever the movie does linger over the human costs he’s trying to redress, the effect is as gruesome as a mutilated body on a slab in a very clean morgue. These choices are a stark reminder that ultimately, even Bilott’s spectacular, hard-won legal victory is a drop in DuPont’s bucket. And it speaks to the pervasive character of the problem (not to mention the chemicals in our drinking water) that even when the good guys gain some ground, the world Todd captures in this movie is one of cold grays, smooth edges and gleaming surfaces to which nothing ever sticks. Not yet, anyway."

"Me and Rick were living in a terraced house in Splott in Cardiff, near Tiger Bay. That’s where we formed our first band, Freur. We were making dub electronics and listening to dub reggae and Kraftwerk’s Computer World and Bowie’s Low. What blew us away was Brian’s (Eno) analogue electronic sound – that kind of degraded sound that he was making – and the fact that this great icon, a hugely famous singer and frontman, had chosen not to sing for half an album. What guts and courage that seemed to take. Years later you read that it ended up like that because he wasn’t around and that Brian experimented in his absence. But it takes great foresight and courage for David to come back and hear that and say, "yep, that’s the album." And not to think that because he’s a singer he has to blast away over the top of it. So that became a part of the blueprint for Underworld – that the singer doesn’t have to be the dominant force. He can play a supporting role. That Berlin period – the three Bowie albums and the Iggy Pop record – deepened the mythology of what I love about Berlin. The idea of going to a place and locking yourself away and making quite an extreme record in a different environment"