"Oh, this is brilliant! And the sound George Martin got on it! I love the opening drumbeat and the bleed with all the drums leaking onto the guitar mics and sometimes onto the vocals if they did the whole track live. The sound of it, to me, was real, raw excitement. They were a great group, they really were. From their days in Hamburg, they were so tight and on that record it really shows how brilliant they were. I think ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ was probably the greatest ever English rock’n’roll song. I would imagine that it’s a good as any old American rock’n’roll song, like the real thing. The real stuff. As good as a Chuck Berry tune or something. It was as solid as anything I’d ever heard or better. With the rock’n’roll records I’d started playing a bit by then – not bad, but a bit – and this song was nice and simple but don’t let that simplicity fool you. Some of the hardest stuff to do is the simple stuff, to make it effective and make it real and make it worthwhile. I thought it was unbelievable and I still do. Today, I still think, ""how the fuck did you do that""? It was like giving it back to the Americans: ""'ere y'are – we can do this as well!""

"We're keen on the White Album because of the way we're making a lot of this music now. I feel like they had a lot of music, and they weren't that worried about the very nuanced production they had delved into with George Martin. It's one of those records that's kind of sloppy, recorded in strange rooms. It has this weirder, drug-damaged vibe about it. For me, I think that The Beatles could not be any greater of a group without a song like 'Revolution 9'. I wouldn't have embraced them as much. Even though I was very young I always thought 'Revolution 9' was just as valid, just as listenable, just as perfect as 'Strawberry Fields Forever', something that has a lot of structure, melody, lyrics. I didn't realise until later how retarded that was. When we started writing songs and learning how to produce records we started to see what a strange, disturbing collage it is. Luckily, that was what I built my world of creating music on: thinking anything that you wanted to do was possible. They'll have these experimental moments, and even Paul McCartney, who's perhaps not as artistically experimental, there's that thing, [sings] "Can you take me back where I came from" [the fragment that follows 'Cry Baby Cry']. [It's] Thirty seconds of him not really having a song. Listening to that when I was young, somehow, is the cornerstone to me remembering that anything's possible - that you don't have to worry about thinking everything through before you do it."

"I’m going to end this list with a request that you also seek out Kurosawa’s Dreams after you see this movie. Dreams is my absolute favorite film of all time, and when you bookend it with Ikiru, the experience is quite amazing. Ikiru is the story of a long-tenured public servant who discovers he only has a year to live. He makes a last-ditch effort to bring meaning to his existence by working tirelessly to build a children’s playground. It is the work of an artist feeling he has not done enough substantive work in his life—a romanticized notion that our daily routine is often meaningless save for a few charitable acts. It is our fears as a young mind. Over the years, Kurosawa would endure a tumultuous career that nearly ended in an act of attempted suicide. Now consider Dreams, a film coproduced by Steven Spielberg and featuring Martin Scorsese in a cameo as Vincent Van Gogh. These filmmakers, along with George Lucas, would rally behind Kurosawa in the ’80s and help him make a comeback with Kagemusha and Ran (both on Criterion), winning him a Palme d’Or and an Academy Award nomination while also bringing back to light his incomparable portfolio of works (Lucas would very often recount how The Hidden Fortress was the narrative inspiration for Star Wars). Dreams, to me, feels a bit like a representation of the playground that Kurosawa built through his works, and the children he inspired coming out to thank him for it. I can watch this movie again and again forever. Criterion has an amazing collection of twenty-five films by Kurosawa. I cannot recommend watching his entire body of work highly enough, as it is perhaps the best documentation of a commercial artist in the modern age."

"When I did ‘Setting Sun’ with The Chemical Brothers it was based loosely on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Do you remember when it went to number one, what song we knocked off the top? ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’ by Deep Blue Something. We were like Sir Galahad. 'And she said, 'What about Breakfast At Tiffany's' and I said, ‘I remember the movie.'' And we came in, 'Off with your head you piece of shit.' Revolver was when the sitars really started to come in with The Beatles, and all the backwards stuff on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. It’s their first drug album. The drums sound great on it and it’s a masterclass of how to make guitar pop. That’s just it. They took what the Beatles had been, they did Revolver and then the next week they’re making ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. They’re a completely different band. It’s a cliché to talk about it now because it’s so well-known but this is a mindblowing album. I went to see the premiere of the George Harrison film the other night [Martin Scorsese documentary Living In The Material World] and on the red carpet outside this journalist asked me this question: 'Would you say that The Beatles have been an influence on your music?' I was that amazed I had to take my shades off. I said, 'Is that a serious question?' And he was only young and in all innocence he said, 'Yes. Why?' I was like, 'Are you having me on?' And he was like, 'No.' Now ignoring the fact that it’s me, if you’re in a band and you’re playing guitar, you have been influenced by The Beatles. That really is all you need to know. The psychedelic stuff they did after this was mindblowing and the Fab Four mop top stuff before this was equally as good but on this record it all came together."