"Seventeen Seconds is my favorite Cure album. It wasn’t the first one I heard; I bought Japanese Whispers and then The Head on the Door, both on cassette tape, and used to listen to them while I did my newspaper delivery round at the age of about 15 in Oxford. But then I went back and started getting into the earlier Cure records. With the people I knew, Pornography and Faith were both really big, but I gravitated toward Seventeen Seconds because it was less heavy, more minimal. Like most of their albums, it has its own unique sound. My favorite track off the album is ‘Play for Today,’ and I was absolutely buzzing when we played with them in Greece last week and they played this and ‘A Forest’ together in the setlist."

"The first time I watched this film, I was 13 years old, and I had no idea what kind of ‘war film’ to expect. My first reaction was that it was too slow; but as I got home that night, the poetry of the narrative, the visuals and the music began to sink in. I ended up dragging my friends to see it, watching the film five times in theaters; and though the film received mixed reactions at the time, I found Terrence Malick’s work to be a transformative meditation on the classic Transcendental themes of the brotherhood of man, self-sacrifice, and faith. It is only a ‘war film’ insofar as the war is a metaphor for the Darwinian struggle of survival in what seems an unjust world."

"This is a film noir that was produced by RKO Studios while Howard Hughes was the controlling owner of it. It stars Robert Mitchum and a woman named Faith Domergue, who was Hughes’ discovery and girlfriend who he basically became involved with when she was a teenager, really, and kept promising that he was going to make her a big star – and didn’t. But this movie is the finest showcase she ever got for her unique talents, which – I don’t know that she was a great actress – but she’s really good in this film as a femme fatale who you would initially think is sort of a vulnerable victim. Then, slowly, over the course of the movie, she reveals that she’s actually running the whole show and is incredibly devious."

"The album with Faith Healer. No one else around the midwest, apart from us guys, was following this kind of music. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were incredible. They were another band I knew about from reading people like Chris Welch. I could picture what they sounded like just from reading, because back then the writers were real writers. I never got to see The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, but I could visualise what they were like. Alex Harvey got up and played with us at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1980, a couple of years before he died. We did 'Shakin' All Over' and he ate a cassette - what the fuck? They were a mash of cool stuff: the music was haunting and heavy and fun, all at the same time."

"This is a strange book, but it’s strange because it’s packed with so many great characters. It’s the story of a little boy, Owen Meany, who has a peculiar voice and believes he is an instrument of God. He and his friend Johnny are on a Little League team when Owen hits a foul ball that kills Johnny’s mother. From that moment, the boys’ lives are intertwined. I could picture and smell and hear what Owen Meany was like. Irving captures the innocence of youth, of people growing up together and figuring out who they want to be, and discovering the pain of separation—that made the book great for me. It’s about faith and fate, and how you don’t know who the messenger is going to be."