"I saw this one on the evening of its release in New York City. The advance buzz spread fears that it would ignite racial friction and incite race riots. The tension in the audience before it began was nothing I had ever experienced before in a movie house. The melting pot of moviegoers sat in stillness and silence and finally stood up and applauded the screen as the end credits rolled. We walked out of the theater transformed, more united, tolerant, and together than we were two hours before. How many films have ever been able to do that?"

"It's a brilliant album. What's not to like? It's universally loved and accepted as an album, as a collection of music. When you're a kid you listen to Beastie Boys because you like to sing '(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)' because it's silly and fun but Paul's Boutique is sophisticated and mature, as well as being really musical, which I really like about it. And long before I had any awareness of what sampling was, all the different bits that they use I was always curious about what they were. I always knew they were from other songs, because some of them I recognised. But it was super fascinating to me. I was already in love with New York and the idea of moving to New York. And in my adolescent fantasy I thought: ""I'm going to graduate high school, I'm going to move out of the house, I'm going to move straight to New York, and then maybe, one day, I'll get to meet one of the Beastie Boys."" And now I've met all of them! James [Murphy] is really good friends with Ad-Rock and he'd be at the studio with us and I'd go there and be with Adam, and eat pizza with Adam. It was so bizarre because 15-year-old me was losing her mind but I had to be cool. But also it was totally normal because he's just a normal guy and he's hanging out with my friend who's just a normal guy and they're doing normal stuff. But no matter how many times I meet them or see them I've never stopped being star-struck. I have to stop myself falling apart."

"One of the best blue-eyed soul voices ever. Famously he didn't do drugs in the '60s and made up for it in the '70s. My girlfriend gave me a book about how he recorded each album, it's incredibly detailed. For this record, he got a studio together in New York and got a load of musicians together to make the record. At no point did he play any of the session players any vocals – they heard bits of music but they had no clear picture of what the actual song would be like. He had a total vision and he didn't want to deviate from that with anyone else's opinion. People talk about records that go from jazz to prog to psych to vaudeville in one track and that's Todd. A proper studio head who could write hooks and songs in an almost Brill Building way. My favourite story about Todd is that he lives in Hawaii and one side of his house doesn't have a wall. He said about it, "Lots of things come in. Animals, super-fans, stalkers, the weather."

"You know what, I think I’m going to swerve The Godfather and go for The King of Comedy. I love Scorsese – I loved Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Mean Streets — they were all really seminal, but I always like a film which is, if not leftfield it’s not obvious Scorsese. He has made less obvious films, like New York, New York or The Last Waltz, which don’t hit the mark for me, but King of Comedy is a gem I think. Curiously enough I was talking about it to my fiancé at the weekend, saying, ‘You’ve got to see it,’ because I think it’s where we are now as a contemporary celebrity-seeking society. There are Rupert Pupkins everywhere now. What they don’t have, that Rupert Pupkin had, is innocence and naivety. When you see the whole Big Brother world, the way that people are cloying to get famous now, that’s Rupert Pupkin. I remember when I first watched The Office I saw a lot of Rupert Pupkin in David Brent. Rupert Pupkin had such likeability whereas Brent is a toad – you want to watch him fail. With Pupkin you want to say, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t go to Jerry Lewis‘ house. Don’t tell Diahnne Abbott you know him — you don’t!'"

"It’s going to be a draw between Godfather II and Manhattan. Obviously, there’s no point in seeing Godfather II without seeing The Godfather, but Godfather II is the only sequel I like. It’s just a spectacular character study and the scope of it, the humor of it, the sex appeal, the action, and the twist of the story and Fredo Corleone and Robert Deniro in the flashbacks — all of that is everything you ever want when you watch a movie. Manhattan I saw in the 1970s as a teenager. Woody Allen was pretty important in my house. My parents are both New York Jews and Manhattan is just an incredibly beautiful movie with a deep expression of humor and existentialism together. It now seems more morally complex to me than I realized, but I just loved things in it like the camera being locked off and people walking in and out of the frame. I noticed that even as a kid and tried to bend my head around the corners."

"This is a bit of a sidestep, but in 1987 I went to the States on a Camp America. Me and my mate applied and we got in and he went to work in this really posh Jewish camp in Massachusetts somewhere, with all these lovely kids. I was working with these underprivileged kids from The Bronx, in Carmel in upstate New York. These kids were rough. I was 18 and they were like 12 and some of them were bigger than me. I shared a cabin with a guy called Daryl who was from New York. He just played the Run–D.M.C. album all day. Bigger And Deffer was out then too, the LL Cool J album. I just loved it. That was when I got into hip-hop. I wasn't sold on the music. I always thought it was a bit lumpy, before Public Enemy came out. It was missing a groove really. But 'It's Tricky' is really uptempo. It's really aggressive, which I liked. It's got that 'My Sharona' riff and that's not going to send you wrong is it? It sounded great in the house. It sounded so alien. My mum and dad didn't want to know and when you're that age you want to be freaking out the straights."