"For a myriad of different reasons. It’s the ultimate group of lawless action buddy movies. They have all spawned from this. Every sort of two handed buddy movie as The A-Team and — it all comes from this one film: Seven Samurai. It gave Hollywood a genre. Not only did it influence the western genre very obviously, with Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood, but every genre of outsider, loner, anti-hero. The character played by Toshiro Mifune, that’s the quintessential character in Hollywood. You’ve seen it played by Montgomery Clift. You’ve seen it played by James Dean, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro. They’ve all been influenced in some way by that one character that appears in the Seven Samurai. The wildness. The gregariousness. The mad genius. The outsider. The survivor. Of course, you know the film is an incredibly, beautifully shot film. Akira Kurosawa is one of the greatest writers of all time. It speaks for itself. I’ve seen it well over a hundred times. But years ago. 20 years ago — possibly the first. Maybe even 25 years ago was the first time I saw it. An extraordinary movie."

"Last but not least, man, will be a classic that really holds up and it’s not a comedy. I don’t want to end this on a neutral or serious note, but Rebel Without a Cause, man. I really, really dig that movie. I really dig that movie and I really dig James Dean. I dig what he was about. I’ve watched interviews and movies about him and stuff, and I just dig him as an artist and I really think that that captures… It’s a coming-of-age story, too, but it’s not the ones that we’re used to — that we’re going to laugh at and feel like, “Oh, they won out.” He’s coming from a very dark place as a teenager, which we all go through. I’m sure a lot of us haven’t been in the darkness as long as his character has, but we get how that feels and it’s kind of cool to see him simmering in that emotion. It’s not anticipated at all, so it’s really seamless. It’s really nice to see. You kind of see him growing up in, like, the scrappiest version it can look like."

"It’s the first album in two years that I’m totally enthralled and inspired by. I don’t know if it’s because of his [Josh Homme’s] near-death experience - Josh did nearly die on the operating table, during a simple operation that went wrong - but the lyrics are really a massive leap. James [Dean Bradfield, Manics guitarist] and Sean [Moore, drummer] have always loved Queens but I’ve never been a massive fan, then this album really got to me. There’s a track called ‘If I Had A Tail’ that’s almost got an In Utero feel to it. The drums are massive, the lyrics are brilliant: ‘I Appear Missing’ what a title! ‘I Sat By The Ocean’ is a bit like ‘Ocean Spray’, it’s got the same sort of bassline. The first time I heard it absolutely blew me away, the musicianship on it is fucking astounding as well. It makes you feel quite defeated. There’s a desert dryness to it as well - anyone who’s been in hospital will relate to it, it has a bare whiteness to it. It’s forensic. It’s actually a really earthy album, but not earthy like Crosby, Stills and Nash. Earthy like you’re lying there having an out-of-body experience. I’ve struggled over the last two years, I’ve loved loads of songs and records, but there’s been no albums that actually sound like an album - this one does."

"Sometimes my biggest reasons for connecting to a film are simple, primitive, just about a feeling. Videodrome and Repo Man are two that fit into that category. In addition to the fact that it costars Debbie Harry in my favorite roll of hers, I love Videodrome for its particular use of my hometown, Toronto. Sure, Toronto is used in films all the time, but usually disguised as New York, or Chicago or Detroit. No filmmaker has used Toronto better and more consistently over the years than our hometown hero Cronenberg, though, and Videodrome he shot and set in the downtown Toronto of my childhood, complete with a central part of the story revolving around our local cable station CityTV (as “Civic TV,” the station James Woods’s character, Max Renn, works for), which really did play soft-core porn if you stayed up late enough. To this day, my dad lives on the street Max Renn lives on, and Barry Convex’s Spectacular Optical is a bakery on the same street as the Electric Youth studio downtown, just a minute away, making the connection both past and present. Repo Man has my favorite Criterion release cover art; it’s amazing and designed by movie poster artist Jay Shaw, who also designed the artwork for singles from our album Innerworld. With Repo Man you get Harry Dean Stanton in his first big-screen lead role, Emilio Estevez as his partner, and the streets of Reagan-era Los Angeles set to a classic punk soundtrack. What more would I need to love this film? Nothing. But like with all great Criterion selections, there’s always something new to take from it with every watch."

"Sometimes my biggest reasons for connecting to a film are simple, primitive, just about a feeling. Videodrome and Repo Man are two that fit into that category. In addition to the fact that it costars Debbie Harry in my favorite roll of hers, I love Videodrome for its particular use of my hometown, Toronto. Sure, Toronto is used in films all the time, but usually disguised as New York, or Chicago or Detroit. No filmmaker has used Toronto better and more consistently over the years than our hometown hero Cronenberg, though, and Videodrome he shot and set in the downtown Toronto of my childhood, complete with a central part of the story revolving around our local cable station CityTV (as “Civic TV,” the station James Woods’s character, Max Renn, works for), which really did play soft-core porn if you stayed up late enough. To this day, my dad lives on the street Max Renn lives on, and Barry Convex’s Spectacular Optical is a bakery on the same street as the Electric Youth studio downtown, just a minute away, making the connection both past and present. Repo Man has my favorite Criterion release cover art; it’s amazing and designed by movie poster artist Jay Shaw, who also designed the artwork for singles from our album Innerworld. With Repo Man you get Harry Dean Stanton in his first big-screen lead role, Emilio Estevez as his partner, and the streets of Reagan-era Los Angeles set to a classic punk soundtrack. What more would I need to love this film? Nothing. But like with all great Criterion selections, there’s always something new to take from it with every watch."

"The film was shown at an all-nighter at the Screen On The Green at the Angel, and for teenage boys the film was great, a bit of James Dean-like rebellion… but the soundtrack, fucking hell, it’s just relentless! ‘Pressure Drop’, ‘Many Rivers To Cross’, ‘The Harder They Come’, ‘Johnny Too Bad’, on and on, every single track’s a winner. And that’s still an album I can put on, absolutely no problem, day or night. At one of our Madstocks we got Desmond Dekker and Toots (Hibbert) to come on and do ‘54-46 (Was My Number)’, and they were loving it, to the point that it’s a very hard song to end, cos it’s just a riff, so by the time we’d played it the fourteenth time, an hour and a half had gone by and they were still happily skipping around… Also, at the first Madstock, we were on the tour bus and our manager said “There’s a feller here who says he’s Prince Buster“. So we were like “Fucking hell, who knows, it might be him, let him on“, and it was! We’d got the name of our band from him, our first single was about him, we’d recorded his songs, but we’d never met him… and suddenly, at our revival in 1992, there he was! So we got him onstage to sing ‘Madness’ with us, and he was a charming man. I think for those chaps it’s a double-edged sword, because they were happy that we gave their music the oxygen of publicity, but at the same time we were making all the flippin’ dough out of it."