"The next one I’ve given is a given. It’s Star Wars. It’s definitely a part of my childhood. It’s hard for me to pick — I think Empire is probably my favorite of the three. But if I was to pick one, I think the first Star Wars would have to be the one, because that’s the one that I remember most. I was a Star Wars fanatic growing up. I guess I still am. Pretty much for everybody who grew up in the 1980s as well, it’s a symbol of their childhood. And most people — it reminds me back home in Ireland it used to be on every Christmas. It was sort of… You got all the action figures and all that kind of stuff. And it was just an incredible, incredible movie, and then when [the others] came out, they were sort of events when I was a teenager — that you wanted to go see them. Even if they weren’t as good."

"This wasn’t my introduction to folk music by any means, but it was my introduction to Irish folk music that wasn’t merely The Dubliners or The Chieftains. It was Irish music that had a bit of balls and a bit of a wayward quality that came I think from those guys knowing about rock music and, generally speaking, what was going on in the UK. You could call them the first progressive folk band. They had a good way of bringing together bits of tradition, mostly Irish traditional music, with an awareness in terms of arrangements that could only come from a knowledge of other musical forms. And of course they feature what was a growing, new instrument, a non-indigenous instrument of Irish music: the bouzouki. Not the bowl-shaped Greek bouzouki but the flat-backed bouzouki that was being made by luthiers in Britain and Ireland as a more convenient, big boy’s mandolin. The bouzouki became an important part of Irish folk music and Planxty used it to great effect."