"When I first appeared, after I did this EP in 1982 with Robert Wyatt [Summer Into Winter], I got a feature in the Melody Maker. The headline was something-or-other "in a blue afternoon". I was likened to him, but had never heard him – I was just a teenager when I made it, after all – and it took my years to find the actual album. It took years to find anything back then. Also, it'd been out of print for years, but eventually I found it, and still love it. 

It's only been since I've got older that I've thought about the roots of that culture, about these men like Fred Neil, Tim Hardin and Tim Buckley who grew up in that New York 1960s culture clash between jazz, folk and the blues, playing supperclubs, smoking weed. This is the first album Buckley produced himself, and it sounds like it. It's got the sense of someone reaching for something beyond his capabilities at that point. It doesn't always work, it's not always perfect, but it's all about human ambition, in its feel and it execution. I love that. All the best albums have that.
"

"I’m desperately trying to find a way not to include His Girl Friday because it’s kind of been touted a lot. But it’s my favorite romantic comedy couple on screen. I think Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in that picture are roughly as great as Beatrice and Benedict in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. That’s how great they are. It’s my favorite Cary Grant performance because it combines the leading man side of his persona with this crazy farceur. I just love hearing people talk as fast as most people think. And I love the fact that they condense this three-hour play into whatever the running time is — ninety, ninety-two minutes — and they basically didn’t cut anything; they just got it all in. I adore this film. That first scene… You watch that first scene when she comes back to the office, and it’s 10 of the greatest minutes of romantic byplay ever, and it’s beautifully performed. I revere Hawks more highly than I do John Ford, and that’s saying something. For me, if you don’t have a Hawks film on that list, you’re lying."

"I used to be really homesick as a kid. I never had sleepovers or anything like that with my friends ever, because I would have panic attacks and wanna go home. And then I watched Up In the Air, and watching George Clooney pack his suitcase so neatly and hop on the plane and just be so organized made me wanna travel by myself and made me love hotels and stuff like that. And I just love the movie as well. It gave me the courage to travel by myself for the first time and leave home. The thing that kinda sucks is that I have a feeling that if I was to rewatch it now, it would be depressing. At the time that I watched it for the first time, it was ambitious – I wanted to travel all the time like that and I thought it was so cool. And then, as you know, the movie gets kind of dark and sad and it’s like, “What are you running from?” At the time that didn’t apply to me, but now I wonder if I would watch it back and be like, “Oh god, this is really too real.”"

"I love all of his records. Calling Out Of Context in particular was the most accessible at first - I had to re-educate my ears at the beginning though, in order to get into it. A friend of mine told me about it at uni - we were just starting Foals and I was getting more interested in pop music - or what my idea of that was - to write simpler, more emotive songs without hiding behind structures and techniques. His music is so open. When we wrote the first batch of Foals songs, we bought this second-hand Royal Mail van that was falling apart and we had one of those cassette adaptors that attached it to a Discman. It was one of those self-booked tours where there was no one there and we would get back into the van and put this record on and it lifted the spirits. It's the perfect record for a summer's day, Sunday morning - it's got a lightness and discreetness to it, I just love his voice. You can feel light within; when I listen to him, I can picture a visual scene filled with light. It's a daytime record"