"I’m on the Wikipedia page of this song? There you go, at least I’m consistent! I’ve obviously talked about it before, but I’ve not really talked about it very much. I can’t really divorce ‘Coconut Grove’ from early 1984, when The Smiths were just getting going. I loved the song then and I still love it now, it’s very evocative, but the reason I brought it up is actually to talk more about what it meant in my life, rather than the actual song. “We’d put out our first album at the start of 1983 and it took off, ‘This Charming Man’ was a hit and my life was really blooming into something kind of incredible for an 18 year old. Without getting too immodest, we seemed to be on everybody’s lips, certainly with young people and their parents were talking about us as well. We were ticking the boxes we wanted to tick; some parents were confused and little bit threatened by us and other people thought we were the bee’s knees. It wasn’t just about getting fame, it was the kind of fame that we really wanted, from kids and fans of what was going to be called indie music and it felt really intoxicating. “I’d been living at our manager Joe Moss’s house and because we were doing these gigs and coming back so late, Janet, who was Joe’s wife - and they had a little toddler - was probably getting so tired of these teenagers her husband had started to look after. He’d never managed a band before, so it wasn’t like he was this big shot manager, he ran a clothes shop and suddenly I was living in their house and giving Coca-Cola to their toddler Ivan, who I still know really well. With this back and forward of bringing the gear in at two in the morning she very kindly said “Look, I’ve got this cottage out in the hills in Manchester…” I would never have gone there in a million years, but essentially she was booting me out of the house! She said “You go and move, I’ll drive you there.” And I thought “Great, I’ve got these digs of my own, this little cottage.” “So all of this stuff was happening. Me and my band were getting in a van and coming down to London, playing at Dingwalls, opening for The Sisters of Mercy, we were the talk of the town and we were getting on Top of The Pops, it was a really heady time. I’d never been reviewed before but because I was playing a Rickenbacker and the sound of my guitar playing everyone was saying ‘He sounds like The Byrds.’ I didn’t know The Byrds very well but through them I got into The Lovin' Spoonful and the whole New York, East Coast folk-rock vibe. “We’d go and do these gigs, drive back and then in this cottage I’d moved into with my mate Andrew Berry I’d eat loads of acid and listen to ‘Coconut Grove’ over and over again, probably two hundred times. The neighbours must have thought I’d died and left the record on. “So that’s what it means to me, it was an idyllic time in my life and I had this really strong love for my mates, who were the band, I think we all felt the same way about each other. Because we got fame, our roles were being defined by ourselves to keep it going and by outside forces and I was very protective of them. We were all pretty streetwise, but I was kind of the chatty, resourceful one who was making things happen and who looked after everybody. I was growing into that role and I was only eighteen. “I called this period ‘The Heatwave’ in my book and you know what a heatwave feels like? Well it felt like that for about a year, I was in a heatwave and that’s ‘Coconut Grove.’ It sounds great on a very hot day, on acid."

"Another incredible thing about Criterion is that in addition to the classics, the treasures, the widely acclaimed, they also have a true love for cult and lowbrow cinema. Director Herk Harvey explains on the Carnival of Souls commentary that they had hoped the film would have an art-house release, and they actually approached a distributor successful in that market and were told that, since it wasn’t in a foreign language, it didn’t really fit. I’m sure being American-made wasn’t the only reason this was a hard fit for distributors, but it was interesting in terms of what art houses were looking for at that time and how the filmmakers saw the film’s niche. This film taught me how to watch Mulholland Drive . . . which is to say, if you stay with the mood, without fighting it, your intuition will serve you far better than the plot and structure and logic your brain is craving. Because essentially all stories are simple; what isn’t simple is the underneath of it all. And that’s more rewarding in the end. I was on a plane about ten years ago when a businessman sat down next to me. Like most people, I dreaded having to talk to someone new. I figured he wouldn’t talk to me anyway, ’cause I have tattoos and he looked very straight-up corporate. He immediately smiled and asked me who I was, what I did for a living. I told him I made movies, but probably none he’d ever heard of. Indie movies. I figured that would shut him up so I could look out the window and mope. He smiled big—“Oh, you mean like cult movies?” I shrugged kindly—well, yeah, I guess you could say that, hopefully that. He said his sister had been in a movie when he was a youngster. A film as independent as it gets. One that had become a cult classic. Somehow I just knew what he was going to say next. His sister was not Candace but another girl in the film, and that man and I talked about Carnival of Souls for well over an hour. And then we spent the next two hours of our flight engrossed in each other as he told me vividly of the supremely radical life he’d led prior to becoming a businessman for the environment! You just never know . . ."