"I love that Jules Dassin took an archetype like the mentor and turned him into the main character. One of the greatest heist films I’ve ever seen, Rififi employs character for the sake of plot progression, resulting in a unique economy of filmmaking. Pure entertainment. Plus, the details: padding a hammer not leaving matches or cigarette butts during a heist, catching debris with an umbrella. And that’s just one scene."

"Oh I just love Fantasia. I played that for my nephew when he was two, and I don’t believe in popping children in front of the television as a babysitter, but I feel like, you know what? “I’m introducing you to classical music; I’m introducing you to classic cartoons, so watch it!” It’s a beautiful way to take music and to take your mind to a place of no words."

"It just cuts in, doesn't it? It's like, 'what the fuck are you doing?' The lyrics are a bit cheesy, but it was written early on, and we forget that the early 80s were only a few years away from the mid-70s, when all really juicy stuff was happening. It's all connected. So you can forgive the cheesy lyrics, and it's a really fantastic song. Brilliant, really."

"It's an album that had a massive effect on me when I was young. I remember on Steve Lamacq's Roundtable, there was a track from Journal For Plague Lovers which a member of Wire completely slagged off. So this shows how much I actually like this album, because he obviously hated us and thought were just plod-rocking, rock-dinosaur philistines. But despite that I'm still going to quote this as a really influential album for me. A lot of people pick Pink Flag and Chairs Missing as their favourite records, but for me this is the apex of their achievement: they're still fusing really blunt-edge experimental rock with really abstract notions and wild ideologues and monologues of different sorts. There's a song on there called 'The 15th' which is just an amazing song; there's another song called 'The Other Window', which has a direct lineage from some of the Velvet Underground narrated songs like 'The Gift', and it's about this guy travelling on a train and outside there's an animal dying in a barbed-wire fence. There's another song called 'Two People In A Room' which is just fucking brutal. A lot of people like Wire then they're bleak or when people couldn't get a handle on what they were saying, but I think on this you can pin down the emotion to the record, pin down the marriage of experimental edge with rock. For me, it's one of the great lost post-punk records. It's an amazing record that never really gets written about. It was produced by Mike Thorne who never did as good a record again. And I just love the cover: it's got a very… almost Mondrian kind of vibe to it. It's really strange and quite unsettling. I just love the record."

"I really like documentaries a lot; maybe more than film. I love this documentary called Hands on a Hard Body. It was made in the 1990s, I think. It’s about this annual event that takes place in Texas — it’s kind of like an endurance test of how long you can keep your hand on a truck. And if you are the last man standing, you get the truck. Literally, you just stand, day and night with your hand on a truck, and there’s like 15 or 20 people all standing there. And it’s such a well-done documentary. They feature each person before the program starts; the director comes in and he asks them questions like, “Why do you want to do this? Why do you want your truck?” and it’s just a real, unique look into people’s lives. It’s really powerful and it’s really moving and it’s kind of funny and odd and bizarre. It goes on for, I think, over 72 hours, and it’s really sad as you see this people dropping out. It says a lot about human endurance."