"My whole thing has gone playlist now, so I'll have this on my headphones now as I walk around because sitting down to listen to two sides of vinyl is less frequent in my life. But certainly when I bought Live Evil, it was the only record that I played for months! And quite deeply so. A friend had lent me an album on CBS, which had an inner sleeve and on this inner sleeve would be descriptions of other records. And on one of them was a journalist wordily describing this as something like, ""… an exploration of a sonic journey"", and that really set my imagination off. And the cover of Live Evil is fantastic. It just looked like a fascinating object, and it was a double album as well. It was a high-risk purchase. But playing this record, it was like, ""Wow! What is this amazing, glowing world?"" And it had these Hermeto Pacoal tracks on it that are really ambient – 'Nem Un Talvez' is one and 'Little Church' is the other – and those tracks really got me. Back then there was no particular place to start listening with what would become ambient music. There were pieces that were beatless but these were deeply coloured and were way before Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze records, which we didn't have much patience for. But there's so much bursting out of this record. Most of it is recorded live and the fact that John McLaughlin was on it really makes it for me, and he's just an amazing artist and guitarist. On this record, he's free as a bird and it's just mental. He just lights up this record. [Keyboardist] Keith Jarrett's on it, and he's a particularly complicated improviser. I jumped into that world and the ripples from diving into that pond, I just follow them. All the people that played on that record came out of Miles Davis' world."

"Anytime somebody’s like, “You want to watch Boogie Nights?” No problem. Carve out the afternoon. I’m ready to go. Again, story, performances, direction, music, era, subject matter — it all works for me on that one. Both as just a simple audience member who wants to check out of life and have a nice time, and also as someone who works in this industry and appreciates as an objective viewer the craftsmanship of that film. I mean, “It’s my big dick and I want to f— now, Jack?” How do you write something better better than that? [laughing] I’m constantly quoting that to friends. But there’s this thing that a friend of mine just showed me on the DVD that’s called the “John C. Reilly Files,” or “Reilly Files.” It’s basically scenes that were not used in the final edit, but are John C. Reilly-based scenes. They are incredible. It’s so cool. So many of them are — maybe my friend who showed it to me, maybe he’s lying — but so many of them are cut scenes during the recording sessions. Things like that, where he’s the ultimate wing man. You know what I mean? He’s repping so hard for Dirk in the recording studio. It’s a bench marker. I would be interested to see what other films came out in 1997. Like what really holds up. Like, Magnolia still holds up for me. Punch Drunk Love still holds up for me. PT Anderson — those movies. I went back and watched There Will be Blood maybe three or four months ago. Just riveting. Those movies don’t get old for me. There’s so much to digest in them."

"It was one of my cassettes but I think that this is my favourite Beatles record. When I was really young my older brother were really into them. There was a very small selection of records in the house so we just listened to those records over and over again. Two of them were The Wall and Dark Side Of The Moon, one of my brothers was big Pink Floyd fan. Another was Dire Straits, Brothers In Arms, and Don McLean's American Pie, and the White Album, which led me to other Beatles stuff. But I love Abbey Road because it's so clearly an album, in that there's clearly a first song and a last song and all the songs in the middle are in an order. You couldn't listen to Abbey Road on shuffle and I like that. I think we've lost a lot of that these days. Things end up just being these singles and no one really buys albums anymore. Albums just aren't constructed that way as much anymore; the whole, the complete package, a narrative, an arc. The first copy I got had somehow been fucked up in the manufacturing process or something because side B was on side A. I remember the first time I listened to it I was listening to it out of order and it sounded weird to me, it felt weird. Then when I realised that it was backwards I listened to it again in the correct order and I was like, "oh, I get it". I also feel like the songs on that record, save for 'Octopus's Garden', also have some darkness about them, which I really like."

"The Deer Hunter. I think the subject matter was very interesting. The way Michael Cimino works, he just got so much out of his actors, especially De Niro, Walken, and John Cazale, even secondary characters like the French guy in the movie. I’ve probably seen the movie 30 times, and you’re just on the edge of your seat the whole time, you don’t know what’s going to happen next. I think the interesting relationship that Walken and De Niro had with Meryl Streep is very complex. Really great movies are made out of special moments, and there were just so many moments in the movie, like when Chris Walken broke down when they were asking him his family’s name while he’s sitting in the window. I always remember that. The way that Bobby De Niro went back to rescue his friend. I think the movie had a lot of layers and a lot of integrity, and I think the love these men had for one another was so real you could identify with it. It was like going back to get your brother, you know?"

"This album is a big one for me. My friend Michael Diamond from the Beastie Boys introduced me to it. He visited me in Portland and I took him to this record store that was $1 per record and it was just bins and bins of records. He said, ""Oh my god, you should totally get this, it's a great record"", so I got it. In it, Isaac Hayes is leading an orchestra and he's also at the piano and he's talking in between songs telling funny stories. So it's almost a cabaret performance. I didn't know what that was when I got the record. Well, I kind of did, as my uncle was a drag queen. But it was the fact that he would tell stories that would lead into a song. I had done that in Bikini Kill but people were just like, ""Shut up and just sing your song!"" and I was like, ""No! What if I specifically made it a part of the show and had things I was going to talk about?"" His stories would turn from tragic to funny. It really validated what I was doing but he was doing it better. I thought, instead of trying not to do it so I don't get shit I should just do it better. Keep doing it and doing it even better and make it more part of the show instead of less. The other huge thing was, ""Why don't I get to work with an orchestra? Why don't I get to work with really talented people and be like, 'No, let's change it to the key of B' like, 'This key would be better for my voice' and have people who really know what they're doing?"" I'm in that band now – not an orchestra, but I'm working with musicians where I'm like, ""Hey, can we do this song for my sweet spot vocally?"" I'm not the leader in the way that Isaac Hayes was on that album. That record really made me question why I didn't think of myself as someone able to work with people who can talk about things being sharp or flat."

"I feel like at one point or another, this is everyone’s favorite movie. Danny Elfman is amazing. I’m a big fan of stop motion. I really have an admiration and appreciation for [it]. I think they do such an amazing job, and they take so long to make. It’s almost flawless. You can’t even tell that they’re fake toys. It looks like animation. I like the music; it was amazing. Danny Elfman always does it with his scores, and Tim Burton is really rad. It’s done so well for the time. That’s a movie that will come around every so often that will just hang in the air and will never — no matter how good the graphics get, or how good your TV gets — at the end of the day, it will never folly. There are some things you’ll put on and go “It looked like that?” But when you watch Nightmare Before Christmas, you know it never gets bad or old. The music is always amazing, and they worked really hard. And that rings through. Stop motion is so great."

"""When I started Sleaford Mods I started to explore my childhood influences, like The Meteors. I was 13 in 1983, but it was a good period of music. Socially it was not very good, but creatively it was great. I tried to dress up, I was a bit of a scooter boy. Pilot jacket, American lightweight camouflage trousers, leather jacket, crows nest haircut that didn't look very good, but you know, that kind of thing. It made a big impression on me, but I didn't experiment with these ideas until Sleaford Mods really, when I found my natural voice. I can sing, but singing is a really difficult thing. I can sing very well and I did that for so many years but it's not my real voice. When I started Sleaford it was my own voice and I married perfectly to that kind of thing. People these days are like, ""Oh you sound like John Lydon,"" well, I don't mean to sound like John Lydon, if there's echoes of that, it's just the way I speak, you know."""