"Beans On Toast is a guy called Jay and he used to run a pub in North London called Nambucca. When I was playing [gigs] in North London, I started hanging out there. Jay had this tiny little guitar and knew basically three chords, and he used to write these fun little songs about stuff that happened to us the weekend before. This was happening during the point in my life when my writing was deliberately complex and I was trying to be obtuse and challenging and all these kinds of things, so to hear that kind of simplicity both lyrically and musically was so inspirational to me. And it was so direct that it felt kind of punk in a roundabout way. I’d spent years writing these obscurantist lyrics and suddenly, here was a guy writing songs about us and our adventures and our thoughts and feelings and foibles and all the rest of it. It just knocked me sideways. When my old band Million Dead broke up, Jay was the leading light for me in terms of what I was going to do next—quite a lot of my early songs sound quite a lot like Jay, for good reason."

"It was my daughter Tiffany who made me see the beauty of this film—she loved it so much as a child, and I think in many ways it spoke to her on the difficult choice for women artists between art and love, a calling of career and the calling of the heart. The Technicolor restoration of the film is stunning. This was one of the early titles in the Criterion Collection, and it’s just gorgeous. The DVD production was helped along with the loving hands (certainly one of my favorite pair of hands on earth) of film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Michael Powell’s widow.There’s fantastic commentary with cinematographer Jack Cardiff and Ian Christie, as well as Martin Scorsese, a close, dear friend of Powell’s. And actress Moira Shearer gives such a wonderful account of the feelings of awe and fear of the dancers around working with living ballet legend Leonide Massine . . . and how in spite of this, she and Massine came to get on like a house on fire. He would fill her with the most amazing tales of his life in the last true golden age of ballet with the great dance impresario Sergei Diaghilev—I cannot even imagine what a thrill these hours of conversation must have been!"