"I saw this at Helsinki’s Love and Anarchy Film Festival with Mark Jenkin taking questions from the audience. From the very opening, I was transported to a completely different place even though we’re in contemporary Britain and I haven’t seen anything so singular from my home country in years. I had a sauna with Mark Jenkin the day after its Helsinki premiere and told him how jealous I was. It’s the kind of film I wish I had made. Its success is remarkable and it regally urinates on the perceived industry wisdom regarding so many things: nobody wants grainy black-and-white 16mm, nobody wants unknown actors and so on and so on. Congratulations not only to the truly visionary Mr. Jenkin, but also to the thousands of people adventurous enough to pay to see such a film. Both parties have hopefully made industry heads doubt their opinions. I recently got into an argument with a friend’s salsa partner who told me off for not being an audience-friendly director after he saw “In Fabric” since he regarded filmmaking as being on a par with customer service. I should’ve used “Bait” as a happy example of a film that finds its audience without pandering."

"I was playing a festival in Istanbul and asked Andy Votel and Dom Thomas if I should look out for any records while I was there. I got a bunch of records from shops, taking them to the counter where I was asked 'do I want them with the picture sleeve or without?' So I asked 'what's the difference?' and it was half price without the sleeve! So I took them without the sleeves, which they removed and tried to chuck away into the bin, but I convinced them to keep the sleeves for themselves. Anyway, I got a bunch of records and many of them were incredible - I used to play and dance to them a lot. They're really upbeat and vibrant with a brutal electric sass fizzing through them, with rhythms that were new to me and this whole new world opened up. I got hold of this Koray album, which is really playful and has had a direct influence on me musically and maybe took me out of Anglo-American song writing [habits]. Although it engages with Anglo-American rock, it's a unique album. It's a parallel pop universe that we're not exposed to. We're more exposed to the music of the economic settlements of the post-second World War!"

"Maybe it’s a thing to do with ageing, but I listen to classical music more and more, and there’s just so much. I chose this because I saw it at the Royal Festival Hall, and it was probably the most powerful performance of a piece of music that I’ve ever been to. Its 100 years old now isn’t it? I was reading that the other day and of course there are all those stories about how shocking it was at the time. I wonder how much of it was down to Stravinsky's hype at the time, that this music was making people so upset. I mean, if they were going to the concert they must have known vaguely what to expect. I love the myth around it all. It also does two of my favourite things. Intellectually it’s untouchable theoretically in the way it’s composed and how unrelated it is to anything that went before it and how revolutionary it was, yet when you listen to the music you don’t consider that at all. The reaction to the music has nothing to do with your brain, it’s purely emotional, and if you’re trying to listen to it and analyse it you are missing the point, you've just got to totally open yourself up to it."

"I was at NYU film school when I first saw If…. The second time was the very next day, when I brought friends and classmates to share this extraordinary movie experience. I have always harbored fantasies of blowing up my high school, but until If…. I never realized that I was not the only one. Obviously If…. was a huge influence on Rock ’n’ Roll High School. In the mid-1980s, I wrote an article about high school movies for American Film magazine in which I opined that If…. was the greatest of them all. A month later, I received a lovely letter from Lindsay Anderson, my hero (I also love O Lucky Man!). We corresponded for several years, finally meeting at the Telluride Film Festival. He called me “a movie brat typical of my generation” for preferring The Searchers to She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. (I treasure his criticism.) Wrapped in a scarf, Malcolm McDowell is as riveting and charismatic as ever in his screen debut. I showed the movie to my teenage daughters, who only know Malcolm as Linderman on Heroes, and it impressed a whole new generation of rebellious teens. If….’s DVD extras, especially “O Lucky Malcolm,” really capture the spirit of the man and the movie."

"Tonto's Expanding Head Band were very early synth adopters. Tonto was an acronym for The Original New Timbral Orchestra which was a reference to what they worked on: the biggest polyphonic analogue synth in the world. Tonto was almost like a cockpit of synths arranged in a horseshoe shape. When they played it, they were inside the machine. Zero Time was hugely influential, most notably on Stevie Wonder who heard it, freaked out and asked them to produce his records. They ended up doing Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness' First Finale. They also did a load of Isley Brothers records, including 3 + 3. Zero Time borders on New Age in a way. I'd never really heard music like this before – totally instrumental, the whole record composed on synths. I saw them live when they played at the Big Chill festival in 2006. I hadn't known they were playing [a line-up consisting of the band's Malcolm Cecil and his son, DJ Moonpup, with a portable version of Tonto performed]. It was amazing, even if it was a bit odd because they interspersed songs with educational stuff, little bits of interviews with Stevie Wonder and other people they'd worked with. It worked though – what a show!"