"They were a fantastic live band and I saw them loads of times. Watching the way Alex was onstage taught me to let things flow and not be so tight-arsed. He improvised a lot. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band had a sense of threat – this feeling that he was a gangster, a bit of a hard guy, a bit shifty. There was a sense of menace in their stage performance, with Zal Cleminson dressed as this wacky clown, which was unnerving. We went through a phase like that – Paul used to get made up, half his face white and half black – when we did a lot of theatrics and a lot of that comes from Alex Harvey. I used to nail Steve Dawson’s DMs to the stage and he’d lean forward because he was nailed to the floor at the back."

"It’s a typical choice maybe. I’m a huge Coppola fan – I’ve seen it many times in many different versions and formats and that movie, to me, is just fantastic storytelling, interesting characters, maybe the best war film I’ve ever seen. You are transported into his incredibly exotic world and it tells the story of something that is based on reality but the director kind of creates his own reality. He constructs this horrible place – his own interpretation of hell and he that makes me believe in it. It’s a movie that I can always watch again and never get tired of, and it always feel like I’m in the presence of a genius magician. I think I prefer the theatrical cut of the movie. The Redux, with the scene with all the French colonialist people, I didn’t feel added much."

"A collection of, yes, four works by John Fante. Rereading this at the moment. Fante is the man who inspired Bukowski and it'd be hard not to see how great that influence is as Bukowski said: "Fante was my God." Anyway it was that comment by CB that led me to Fante who I prefer as a writer if I had to pick. The crab-shooting passage of The Road to Los Angeles will stay with me for ever and Ask the Dustcorrect, a doomed Los Angeles romance is just fantastic. Robert Towne directed a film version of this a little while back. It's an admirable misfire but he did use the novel previously as a template for the LA of his Chinatown screenplay. The quartet also includes Wait Until Spring, Bandini and Dreams of Bunker Hill."

"This one really shook up the filmmakers of my generation before we started making our own films. The late comedian Bert Lahr told me that, when he was in the first production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1956, “I did that damn play for ten weeks, and I never understood a word of it.” I’ve seen Marienbad at least twenty times over the past fifty years, and I don’t understand one scene of it, but what a fantastic experience. I don’t 
understand the Grand Canyon or Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, either, but they continue to move me. Marienbad is that rare film that changes the possibilities of narrative in cinema. I no longer try to “figure it out”; I just let it take me. The soundtrack can get on my nerves, but the film itself is visual music."

"When I was about 16 or 17 I bought my first stereo unit. It had white speakers. Up to that point we'd only had a radiogram in our house, so this was the first time I'd heard stereo. I'd put my head between the two speakers on the floor and just listen to this record over and over again, I just couldn't believe it. It's an underrated record, but I think it's a fantastic album, it's got some really great songs on. Sonically, if you listen to it through really good speakers it sounds amazing. Now I've got bigger speakers I put it on really really loud. I've got a place in Maine, that's where the loud equipment is, and that's in the middle of the woods so I can play stuff as loud as I like."

"NOGGIN is headed for greatness and is without a doubt my favorite YA book. I won't go into plot or anything because that would mean getting aHEAD of ourselves since it doesn't pub until next April, but for anyone who's read WHERE THINGS COME BACK, I promise you that NOGGIN is a follow-up that will blow your head off your shoulders. I've never cried reading a book before - and I've read many, many books - but there was a beautiful scene that transformed me from robot to human and that's a testament to Corey's writing. There are so many lines in this novel that only HE could've written and they're fantastic. If you're a teenager or adult or robot, you'll love NOGGIN and admire how Corey manages to get into the head of his character. (Pun pun pun pun.)"