"It's really weird: I kind of had a bit of a problem with The Teardrop Explodes. I really didn't like them as a group, and it's very strange because our recording desk in Cardiff… I think Kilimanjaro was recorded on it. But as soon as Julian Cope left Teardrop Explodes I just completely turned onto him, and especially this record, because it's brilliant. There's some benchmark songs on here, which are hard for anybody to top. There's one called 'Bill Drummond Said' which is just fucking brilliant, and there's a song called 'Reynard The Fox', which is just… he does such a brilliant job of having a narrative of why he disagrees with something but pitching it in such a beautiful way. And there's 'The Bloody Assizes'; Julian Cope, now, has this afterlife of being this writer who seems to mix the high-rise block of ideas in his head with reality. It's really amazing. And he's become some sort of historian about myth and Krautrock, and I loved one of his quotes when he did an interview for this book: "I only look like this because I feel like such a cunt when I'm crying inside all the time." This record shows why he's such a brilliant solo artist. It's got a lovely, bucolic flintiness to it. There's something about it; you realise he's detached himself from his previous life and The Teardrop Explodes, and he's just out there in the woods doing something. And you cannot like a record which has a cover of the artist's… you know. Naked inside a big turtle shell on the cover. I remember it got really mixed reviews, but I think a lot of people do consider it a classic. I do; he's done other good stuff, but it's his best record."

"I have to include a Woody Allen film in the list. I’m not sure which one, though. I love him dearly. I mean, he’s such an inspiration to me. And again, this list could change — and particularly, his movie choice could change tomorrow or this afternoon. The one I always love rewatching for pure comedy, for just gags that really resonate with me — which he didn’t direct, but it’s based on a play that he wrote — is Play It Again, Sam, which just has a couple of comic set pieces that really amuse me. I can watch them endlessly. And it’s sort of one of those movies that I always make other people watch or I loan to people. If they take as much joy in them as much as me, then I know that we’re going to be friends for life. [Woody Allen] plays a film critic, funnily enough, and he is sort of given romantic advice by the ghost of Humphrey Bogart, and Bogie appears throughout in places to offer him love advice. But as he sort of points out, you know, “I’m not you.” It’s him trying to sort of romance girls and meet women after his marriage falls apart. But it’s very, very funny, and it just — a bit like After Hours, in a way — it sort of captures the desperation of single men, single men who don’t feel comfortable chasing girls. It has loads of very funny set pieces. It has a sequence where he’s setting up his apartment for a blind date, which is just, to me, one of the most inspired comic routines I’ve ever seen. It’s physical, but it’s verbal as well; it’s sort of him at his most charming, effortless. It’s really good."

"There's a reason that I left this one for last. I put it in this position because it seemed like the natural conclusion to this collection of songs. It's the climax, it's the one that gathers everything up and then sums everything up emotionally. It's the finale - everything's building up to this moment. There's centuries of pain, tragedy and - again - loss in his voice, it's undeniable. “The lyrics are based around one extremely simple metaphor, but so much that's good in art, whether we're talking about visual art or songwriting or performance art or literature or poetry, so much that's truly powerful takes one easily understood idea and then brings depth to it. That's what's happening here - it's a metaphor that you instantly understand. It's like looking at a Picasso painting; you're immediately struck by the image, but there's so much more going on beneath the surface. You can listen to it hundreds of times and not feel as if you've exhausted its emotional content. “We were talking about Trish Keenan earlier, but she seems like one of the exceptions to the rule I subscribe to, which is that you should be able to understand everything purely from the performance and the lyrics. You shouldn't need to know anything about the artist's personal life. Paul Robeson was this gargantuan figure of the twentieth century; there was that intelligence, integrity and, for the most part, nobility to him, going as he did from singer to actor to petitioning the President of the United States, but you wouldn't even have to know the slightest thing about him, and you'd still have that instant reaction to this song; there's so much emotional power to it. “I don't know how I'd deal with life if I didn't have music like this - to help me go through it, and to help me understand it.”"