"The first time I can remember hearing a synthesiser was sometime in the late '70s. I must have been eight or nine and I was on a driving holiday with my parents in the Pyrenees. 'I Feel Love' was on the radio and it freaked me right out. It scared me; that sequence flipped me out. 2000AD had just launched and I was really, deeply into it. All the stories were about terrifying dystopias and that song coming out of the radio sounded like a herald for one of those places. Years later, Silver Apples pushed similar buttons for me. They came about when synthesisers were more readily associated with almost academic music – people like Pierre Henry, Morton Subotnick, musique concrète stuff. Silver Apples created a sound I'd never heard before. The closest comparison (with a bit of hindsight) is something like NEU! – that driven, motorik sound. Silver Apples were before the first NEU! record by a few years. They sounded futuristic in name and sound; they built their own gear and credited the synth as a member of the band (The Simeon). There's a real toughness to the music, something very street."

"Five Easy Pieces is inventive, very funny, very fresh, and just a joy to watch. Probably one of the funniest moments in cinema I’ve ever seen happens when they’re driving with the two girls they’ve picked up, and one of the girls just keeps saying negative things about trash and filth. I love that Bob Rafelson had such freedom that he didn’t mind going deeper and deeper and repeating a joke. You feel that he doesn’t need to go fast just because there’s a producer telling him the joke has been understood and we need to move on. The moments are meaningful in themselves, and if you’re enjoying them, why not carry on? This is what Rafelson does, and I find it incredibly funny. But at the same time, it’s also deep. I would say that the last sequence at the gas station is probably one of the best endings in the history of cinema. This is the film every beatnik would have loved to make. It perfectly expresses this feeling about living intensely but without a sense of purpose, not knowing where you’re going."

"The rawness is what perked me up when I heard this first - and I've never forgotten that. You know, I've gotten a lot of her albums since, but that first one... There's an American singer called Nancy Wilson and the tone of their voices is very similar. When they first played it, I was driving back down to London from the north of England - it came on the radio and I thought, 'Thank God, Nancy Wilson has gone back to church.' You know what I mean, Nancy Wilson has got more soul, because the tones of their voices are very similar. But then they said 'this new singer, Aretha Franklin...' so I went out and bought the record in London. Meeting her for the first time [Franklin appeared on This Is Tom Jones], Aretha was very quiet - unbelievably quiet. I mean you'd go 'Hello' and she'd say 'Hello.' 'How are you?' 'Fine thank you.' 'Great!' And that's it. And when we were doing the rehearsal, and she'd open her mouth to sing, the volume that came from this woman - how can a girl who's so shy and quiet - all of a sudden BOOM - burst?"