"Andy might have been cheating a little bit by picking two Pogues songs, and I might be doing the same with this, because it’s just under an hour long. I’m getting my money’s worth out of my three picks! “The first time I heard this track was when it was sampled by an Italian house band called Sueño Latino in the late 80s’. Their version had more of a four-on-the-floor kick to it, so you could dance to it and that’s where I first heard it, in Ibiza way back. It really spoke to me straight away; I couldn’t pinpoint any of the sounds and it felt as if it came from the future. It had this Balearic, soulful feel to it and yet it was electronic. It was about as far out a piece of music as I’d experienced and it seemed totally unique at the time. “I slowly unravelled it and got back to the original by Manuel Göttsching, which is just mind-blowing. It goes back to the days of those electronic concept albums. I read somewhere that it wasn’t ever supposed to be released, that he just made it for himself so that he had something to listen to on long-haul flights - which is the kind of self-indulgence you expect from a German electronic pioneer! “I love that it has so much soul and yet it still doesn’t sound as if it’s of this world. It’s a total shapeshifter and there’s still an intoxicating sense of escapism about it for me, which is something I’m always chasing in my own work. Like the Beck and Smiths songs, it was a track that had a profound effect on me, and made me think, “I want to learn how to do that, or at least try. I want to live in that world."

"Blew my mind. I didn’t see it until I was middle-aged, after decades of thriving on the ongoing French New Wave. I thought of the New Wave as beginning in these subversive young Parisian cineastes’ love for American genre films. My jaw was dropped the whole length of Journey to see the sensibility and techniques of the New Wave appearing first in this Italian flick (though English-language, starring George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman). Later I read that Truffaut called it the “first modern movie,” and I believe he’s right. I haven’t researched, so don’t know if this is a commonplace, but, on a side note, it’s interesting to consider the parallels between Journey and Godard’s Contempt. They’re both about a couple whose marriage is failing, who are foreigners on a visit to Italy, where their stiff estrangement reaches a head amid the vital, pagan-slash-Catholic ancient culture of the area around Naples. Noble, erotically charged, millennia-old statuary reverently track-circled to swelling music. Local color, and travelogue landmarks of aesthetic and mythologically poetic power, integrated naturally into the story (almost Hitchcockian in a way, except with an emotional and intellectual justification). The most groundbreaking thing about it, though, is the way it’s not exactly a story, but rather a situation, depicted in fragments and episodes—the emotional situation of a couple, displaced within a continuously intruding, alien or disorienting environment, and one that keeps us conscious of death and history. A lot is pointedly artificial about it—to me the dialogue all feels like exposition, and is delivered that way, as presentation of the situation, rather than anything natural—or at least frankly cinema, but at the same time it feels like life in a way that movies hadn’t before."