"This was the first thriller I ever saw—on our eleven-inch black-and-white TV set in the small living room of my parents’ home in the suburbs of Birmingham. It was the most romantic and exciting thing I had ever seen, and I can still get lost in it today. The 39 Steps is the blueprint for all the classic Hitchcock films that would follow. Sexy stars, fantastic locations, and quirky cliff-hanger scenes that you want to watch over and over. In this film, it is the Mr. Memory scene that I look forward to most, and every time I see it, it still makes me jump!"

"Because they did great character buildup in it. By the time they got out and were battling the shark, you knew the three characters intimately. I think we lose that in a lot of our movies today — they’re so set in throwing the action at you as quick as they can. They don’t allow the character to develop to where you can feel for the character and I think Jaws did a marvelous, fantastic job with the three characters on the boat and the action – how they held the scene with the shark for as long as they did — the shocking moments of it."

"Wings of Desire, by Wim Wenders. The guy who wrote the screenplay, Peter Handke, is a playwright in Germany, and I was very much a part of reading the avant garde writers, be it plays or novels. I loved his writing, it was so strong and so sharp, and when the film came out, I just loved it. Everything about it was marvelous. Bruno Ganz was so brilliant. He’s brilliant most of the time. On our side of the ocean, let’s say, he was one of our stars, like Redford and Paul Newman and Brando were on that side. I had a few European actors where I went, “They’re so fantastic.”"

"Joy Division used to play Trans-Europe Express before we went on stage, to get us into the zone. It worked because it gets up a lot of momentum. Radioactivity was a bit of a downer album for me, but Trans-Europe Express just seemed to express an optimism - even if people see it as machine music. It reminds me of Cabaret , the film, with all of the 1920s singing. For Kraftwerk, it's proper 'songy'. It's the same thing as with LCD Soundsystem and Sparks; when you get that marriage between humans and machines, and you get it right, it's fantastic. I have to say it's my favourite Kraftwerk album."

"Oklahoma City was a test city for MTV, and this compilation of US and UK punk rock bands – XTC, the Cramps, the Dead Kennedys – came out around the time, and had that same spirit. One song each, blam-blam-blam. You didn’t know who was American and who was English and it didn’t matter – what did was every band was doing it themselves and looking bizarre. And in a world where you knew you could never be the Beatles, here was John Cooper Clarke performing to 50 people and being fantastic. That felt huge. Seeing the energy coming off the audience when he made that effort really did something to me."