"One of the greatest players to ever pick up the guitar. Oddly enough, he started out as a drummer. Figure that one out. Not only that, but he was left-handed and a lot of the time he played right-handed models flipped upside-down. “Albert had been releasing singles for quite a while, since the mid-‘50s, but he’s probably best known for the phenomenal recordings he did for Stax in the ‘60s. This was his second album for Stax, and even though it’s comprised of singles, it works as a whole album. “And dig the backing band - Booker T And The MGs. You can’t ask for much more. Again, I call this album part of the ‘Mississippi mystery.’ How did Albert King get that sound? I don’t know. But it’s all right here. Songs like Born Under A Bad Sign, Crosscut Saw, The Hunter…man, they’re just the coolest. Guitar players who want to study a one-of-a-kind tone and hear a man who really knew how to bend a note can’t go wrong with Albert King.”"

"The first time I can remember hearing a synthesiser was sometime in the late '70s. I must have been eight or nine and I was on a driving holiday with my parents in the Pyrenees. 'I Feel Love' was on the radio and it freaked me right out. It scared me; that sequence flipped me out. 2000AD had just launched and I was really, deeply into it. All the stories were about terrifying dystopias and that song coming out of the radio sounded like a herald for one of those places. Years later, Silver Apples pushed similar buttons for me. They came about when synthesisers were more readily associated with almost academic music – people like Pierre Henry, Morton Subotnick, musique concrète stuff. Silver Apples created a sound I'd never heard before. The closest comparison (with a bit of hindsight) is something like NEU! – that driven, motorik sound. Silver Apples were before the first NEU! record by a few years. They sounded futuristic in name and sound; they built their own gear and credited the synth as a member of the band (The Simeon). There's a real toughness to the music, something very street."

"I sat next to someone called Arnaud Desplechin at a dinner once in Paris. At home a week later, I saw a movie called A Christmas Tale. It was jaw-dropping, immediately one of the best films I’d ever seen. I got up from the couch thinking, Who in God’s name directed this thing? At the TV, I flipped over the DVD case and shrieked. I’d been sitting right next to him and hadn’t said a thing. I was distraught—like someone who decides not to buy an eight-dollar painting at a thrift shop only to find out later that it was a Picasso. Surely A Christmas Tale is built on one of our sturdiest clichés, that of a dysfunctional family reuniting for the holidays. But that’s where everything you’ve ever seen before ends. There’s not a filmic technique that isn’t employed to its fullest, no trick Desplechin is afraid to pull. Every beat is specific, there’s not a written false note, and it has some of the ballsiest acting on any side of the Atlantic. I only wish I had known all this when I was sitting next to the man. C’est la vie."