"Istanbul, London, Madrid, Boston…ever since my childhood I lived in numerous countries. One of the downsides of a nomadic life is that you can never keep a proper library. At some point, I had boxes of books in Istanbul, waiting to be shipped, boxes of books in Arizona. You have to let go of even your most beloved possessions when you live a peripatetic life, but there was one author whose voice I could never do without: James Baldwin—the observer, the commuter, the rebel. Notes of a Native Son is a collection of essays about language, racism, hatred, and ultimately, resilience and dignity."

"I love this drama by Nicholas Ray, shot in CinemaScope. James Mason plays a professor and family man who has a troubled relationship with over-the-counter drugs. Bigger Than Life is a modern take on U.S. society in the 1950s that was unusual at a time when Hollywood and television were invested in depicting picture-perfect nuclear families. The film is both disturbing and fascinating."

"My favourite video of all time is actually for James Blake’s A Case Of You, the one that has Rebecca Hall in it – I can’t watch it without my entire body shaking. But, for what a video really, really should be, for pure Thriller-like entertainment value, you can’t get much better than the video by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis for Downtown. The dancing! The marching! The mopeds! The chariots! You have to give in to that video – how ridiculous it is. It played a lot with hip-hop culture – and I love hip-hop culture, I love the bigness, the grandness, the showing-off-ness of it, I appreciate it and I revel in it. But there’s something about these guys mocking the extravagance of it that I really responded to. It really made me laugh – I was in tears watching it. And actually I think you can see Macklemore pissing himself laughing at the end… Ryan Lewis, who produces the records, produced and directed the video. Epic."

"My sister and her friends were obsessed with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I remember she would be singing these crazy, filthy lyrics, and I’d think ‘what is this band?!’ Again, I was playing the drums, and I enjoyed the drums. There’s covers on this album of ‘Higher Ground’ and Sly And The Family Stone’s ‘If You Want Me To Stay’, which were songs that I had heard but didn’t really know. I think they’ve become an establishment band in a weird way, but me and my friend James went through this period of watching old Red Hot Chili Peppers stuff on YouTube and it’s amazing! When they were young they were crazily charismatic. I think it’s because they’re still going that they’ve become this band that’s a bit more disappointing. But there will come a time when people realise they were pretty unusual; this is quite a good record! I heard ‘Give It Away’ or something like that in a record shop, then going to the counter to try and buy what you assume is the album that that’s from and ending up with the Greatest Hits. I could have included Incesticide as well, I bought it because I thought it was the cheapest thing I could find!"