"People who didn’t live through that period or weren’t old enough to know what was going on somehow imagine that there was this fantastic post-punk thing going on. That’s all made up in hindsight. Really, everything was pop of the most plastic kind. And a lot of it was quite terrible. Though I did like Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” which came out in 1984. There was a real thing in the early-to-mid ’80s about modern classical music; there was a lot of that stuff around, and those were the more interesting things. If you know Tabula Rasa and know anything about the music that I’ve been involved with, you might struggle to find how I would connect with that kind of music. But it’s not really experimental music. It’s very emotional. It doesn’t have the form of a song but it’s not far from the world that Eno was exploring with his Ambient series."

"Another movie that is hugely influential to me and I never get tired of watching it. The cinemascope photography is unbelievable, evolutionary and fantastic. The performances, the production design and the pacing – it’s kind of slow but it draws you into it and it makes you wish there could still be movies like that nowadays. I mean most movies these days are made for teenagers. It’s almost as if people’s brains work differently these days. Maybe its commercials and music videos and videogames and you just want more stimuli at a faster pace. Filmmakers seem to be afraid to trust the audience more. I don’t mean that movies should be slow and boring, but if you have a good enough script you should be able to use the power of the image to tell a story. It’s like if you look at Pixar movies like Wall-E, actually I do think they have a slower pace, there’s such richness in every frame."

"A classic musical exploitation film, only with a good script, a good director and The Beatles at the height of their first flush of fame. It's got a slightly bullshitty plot, but it rolls along at a fantastic lick and obviously you get a lot of great musical performances. But it's those scenes where they're chased through Marylebone station that are the most amazing. The phenomenon of public youth hysteria is really interesting. The book documents three historical moments of it. The first was August 1926, when Rudolph Valentino died and tens of thousands of kids came on the streets, there's a brief snippet of it in the film, we actually found some footage. Then in 1939, when The Wizard Of Oz opened in Manhattan - Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland arrived in grand central and were mobbed by kids. And then obviously Sinatra at the Paramount which is the climax of the movie."