"I think I was graduating from college, yeah. It was just so fresh and amazing, and the storytelling, you know, changed cinema forever. I just loved it. And it brought back John Travolta. Every character was incredible, and I loved its really dark sense of humor. Like, literally some of the hardest laughing I’ve ever done in my life was when John Travolta accidentally blows the head off that guy. [laughs] Making that funny is such a feat. The comic sensibility of Quentin Tarantino never ceases to amaze me."

"I’ve really genuinely loved every one of Spike [Jonze’s] movies from [Being John] Malkovich to Adaptation to Where the Wild Things Are, also. But I thought Her still had, like, the fun humorous stuff but was, for me, such a great movie to encapsulate what it’s like to have the hangover of a breakup that just won’t go away. And also I think it’s probably the most realistic version of where we’re heading with technology and our relationship with technology, as we delve further into ourselves and out of public interaction. How we still need and want human interaction. And I just think he handles both of them so beautifully. And I love the way he shoots his movies, I love the colors he uses. I just love Joaquin Phoenix’s shirt in that movie. I was less concerned with the pants."

"Well I was always a Sticky Fingers and Goat’s Head Soup guy. But I never really understood Exile…. Well it was more that everyone was going on about it and I didn’t understand why. And I just thought there were too many songs on it, and too many unfinished ideas. And you kept seeing all these editions of it. I hate it when you’ve got a band like the Rolling Stones who have millions of brilliant songs and loads of great albums and someone goes: “But THIS is the definitive, mega album.” I just don’t like being told that, so I was always quite resistant. But then last year I just said: “Enough is enough, I’m going to stop fighting it.” I read something amazing about that period of their touring and how mental it was, and I thought, “Fuck it, I’ll listen to it again.” And I listened to it, and haven’t stopped listening to it! I love it now. It’s got loads of brilliant songs on it, but they aren’t like mega hit songs, if you look through the list you don’t see what you would consider to be one of the all-time golden classic Rolling Stones songs. But when you listen to the album it just makes sense."

"That album for me was just…It sounds like they’re – instead of using a drum kit on their songs they will just tap a pencil on a desk into a microphone. That album, for me, also is a testament to great song writing, that you don’t need a lot of production. I think that helps me be relaxed about making an album when I started the Drums. I said to myself, “Look, I have no money. I’m riding my bike 6 miles to work to work at a shitty outlet mall only to ride back and make music.” I couldn’t afford to make a record. Knowing that Beat Happening did that with a pencil and a desk for a drum kit…I have this rule, if the song is good just by whistling it, then you don’t really need a bunch of gear and production. People will connect to the melody, and people will connect to the lyrics. So, Beat Happening was big for me."

"Tobi Vail, the drummer from Bikini Kill told me about them, and I went to the record store and bought it and I smoked too much pot and listened to it and I was like, "WHAAAAAAAT?!" There was so much in it, and it was not because I was stoned, because then I listened to it not stoned and I still kept finding stuff in it. Sonically they really changed my world and the freedom and the looseness. They were funny, tough and experimental. In my small town there was a certain sound formula that people were doing and I was like, "Man!" I appreciated women being able to experiment outside of these genre boundaries. They sounded so determined and weird to me. They taught me about production. I listened to that album so many times to figure out how it was produced: which side the guitar was panned to, was there a double guitar? I would just sit here and pick it apart in a way that I had never wanted to pick something apart before. To me the sound of that album and the way it was produced was such a great reflection of their material. It just really got me thinking about and being excited about production. This was probably a couple of years into Bikini Kill. There was also a radio interview we heard with them, they were asked about sexism and stuff like that and every time they'd moan and make crazy dog noises because they clearly were always asked about gender and were so sick of it. I'm always trying to be super diplomatic but they were just such awesome brats. Some guy called up and was like, "I'm really interested in your show I can't wait to see it" and they were like, "I'm in the phone box around the corner", just making fun of him like he was some perv. They were fun punks and it's not just about the funniness of it but also about speaking back to power and you can do that through humour."

"The very first Small Faces record was one of my favourites, with 'E Too D', 'Shake', 'Sha La La La Lee' and 'Whatcha Gonna Do About It?' That's one of the best records ever. I never saw the Small Faces, but they got on the radio. 'Shake' was the song – simple, three chords, but it sounded like everything was going on. It was a record that wasn't live, but sounded live to me. It's a great party record - a little dated now, but it is 50 years old. They sounded like they were having so much fun. I like records that sound like the band are having fun; mistakes never bothered me. The idea of mod didn't matter to me - they were just a British Invasion band."

"The first Stooges album came and went, it was a band finding its feet, learning how to play, being part of a scene, being influenced by the MC5, and it's really amazing. But Fun House… just listen to the difference between the two records. You have to wonder what happened in between; was it mind-bending psychedelic drugs? That's what you'd think, isn't it? It's psychedelic, there's jazz in there, it's an unfathomable album and it's been very influential. It was produced by Don Gallucci from The Kingsmen, which seems like a really weird combination. They had real problems recording it, which is why there are so many different versions you can get of it. And nothing was working so they ended up stripping everything out of the studio and just doing it as a gig. So it's Iggy with a handheld mic and the band are just amped up and really going for it. And there are real punk songs on there like 'Down On The Street'. That is prototype punk: like the blueprint for punk. It's a benchmark album, and the fact that they produced it in 1970 is even more amazing. Imagine being a kid in 1970 when that landed… it didn't sound like anything else on Earth."