"I wanted to pick something from Drag City and I went with Silver Jews because I think David Burman is such a great lyricist. It's funny when someone is alive, it's almost as if you're not allowed to say that about people. He's one of the best writers around. This record starts with the line 'in 1984 I was hospitalised for approaching perfection' [pauses] How much better of a first line can you have on your record?! I have a hobby of taking words and mixing them around. I can do that for a whole day, just taking four words and moving them around and mixing them up, just to find a combination that I think evokes something emotional, but David Burman is on another level. He takes language – nothing that's complicated on the surface – and puts it together in such amazing ways. He'll say things like 'Her hair was shiny like video tape' or 'the water looked like jewelry coming out of the spout', weird things you'd never thought of until he said them but they ring true. When you hear his records, he makes you feel like you've never seen the world before. So I commend him. This record is his Americana record, and I wish this is what people talked about when they use that term. He's a brilliant author explaining his vision of America to you - that should be Americana instead of some weird sappy throwback thing."

"I remember hearing Johnny Appleseed and being like, ‘Yo! This is another level.’ It’s got like this Caribbean rhythm, acoustic guitars and simple harmonies, and him talking about everything from ’49 Buicks – which I knew everything about – to Martin Luther King tand even the old folklore of Johnny Appleseed. I really related to everything he was saying. When he asks in the song ‘Do you hear what I’m saying?’ I was like ‘Yeah dude, I do hear what you’re saying.’ There’s that question that he poses, too: ‘Is what was once true now no longer so?’ I still carry that line around with me today. That song shaped another facet of me as well, because it showed me that you could still play music with punk energy but you don’t have to play punk songs. It showed me that you could be political and social and talk about relationships or whatever, and still have the forcefulness of punk rock without playing aggressive music. And I don’t have no time to spike my hair up. That’s more show to me. At the time I was like, ‘I can only afford one shirt. Why the hell would I rip it up? If I rip it up and it rains then I’m gonna get wet.’ I’ve always tried to stay in that thing that it’s not about what you look like: it’s about what you do. You have to believe it and you have to mean it."

"When I think of classic rock, to me this album defines what that is. This album influenced me at an early age. I recall my parents were watching the Smothers Brothers TV show and The Who were on performing 'My Generation' I think, I can't quite remember, but the drums blew up at the end and I was like 'Holy Shit, this is amazing.' This album veered me away from the pop music that my mother would purchase or I'd hear on top 40 radio. There was a record store in town, a stoner shop, you could go in there and buy pipes and stuff, but they also carried all The Who's albums in there. I would always pop in, hang out and look at the jackets, which is sadly missing from these days. This album is so ambitious, the performances are spot on and the songwriting is incredible. It was somewhat experimental the way Pete Townsend used the harp, the sequencing and the keyboards - it was a big texture of the music which was different than what he had done before. The album is full of rock anthems; 'Baba O'Riley', 'Bargain', 'My Wife', and 'I Won't Get Fooled Again' which is one of the greatest rock songs ever. That scream at the end, it's just one of those moments where the hair on the back of my neck goes up every time I hear it."

"I'd heard of Andy Warhol, but I'd never heard The Velvet Underground until David Bowie talked about them in interviews in the NME, and of course Transformer. I'd rather talk about Transformer than the banana album actually, because Transformer sums up the era. I do believe that Mick Ronson was very instrumental - like a classically trained musician as well as a gorgeous rock god lead guitarist. His arrangement abilities for both Ziggy Stardust and Transformer have not been fully recognised in the history of pop music. I don't think David would've broke through without that. I remember dancing to 'Vicious' in a nightclub called Masquerade in Liverpool - a really eccentric gay bar full of diesel dykes, prostitutes and older gay men with dyed black hair and toupees. It was a strange netherworld hidden up a back alley that embraced a bunch of freaks of my generation like Pete Burns and me, Jane Casey, who wore too much make-up. That was the thing about a gay club, you were safe almost in there. A strange refuge. I suppose in a way, punk kind of helped that. Absolutely. One minute you were queer on the street, the next minute you were a punk. It normalised that sort of behaviour really, you know; ""Oh, they're just punks"", and it was a diversion away from sexuality. Punk was strangely non-sexual. Even the main protagonist John Lydon had something of a 'neither here nor there' about him."

"The next one, I think we got to go to Bergman. We go to go to Seventh Seal. Seventh Seal just knocked me dead. On many levels, it’s such a simple film. You’ve got Mary and Joseph, the young people with their little traveling theater, and then you’ve got the knight. I think it was the way he dealt with the Middle Ages and intrigued me with Death there at playing chess. Those were images that just stuck in my head. It was funny. When I was doing Parnassus, I went back and looked at it, because I was trying to remind myself what Mary and Joseph and their little traveling theater was like. I had forgotten so much detail. That was just a really important film, and Max von Sydow was something… The first time I had seen basically a non-American actor at work. He looked different. He behaved differently. Because, you know, I grew up with Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Doris Day, Rock Hudson — shiny teeth and beautifully combed hair and all of that nonsense. Something profound was going on in that movie without pointing fingers at anything. It just did it. The squire — that was Gunnar Björnstrand, I think — was just a great character, the cynic in the midst of it all. I remember when he was talking, when he was in this church, and all the frescoes are there, and it’s just profound filmmaking."

"And their next movie, Raising Arizona, came out and had this insane soundtrack. That crazy Pete Seeger “Ode to Joy” on the banjo with whistling and yodeling and it was totally mad. And every joke on it landed for me — one of the things about the Coens is there’s history in every shot. Some people say “Where do you want to put the camera?” but in the morning, they’ll draw up signs and give the actors with the lines and below a drawing from the storyboard of the camera angle they’ll be in when they have those lines. They have it all cut in their head when they do it. This is why they have control. Economy is the essence of art you know. I was looking at the detail in Raising Arizona and I thought, “We must have seen all the same films growing up because it was just speaking to me.” And it got to the part where John Goodman and his cohort come out of the ground and go into the service station to comb their hair and in the mirror you can see in spray paint OPE POE backward in the mirror. And I thought, “Really interesting this is how detailed they are.” They would take a quote from Dr. Strangelove like “Purity of essence, peace on earth” and put it backwards on a mirror and spray paint it on the wall somewhere backwards in Arizona."