"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."

"I tell people that my favorite film is Gandhi, but my actual favorite film is Patton. Well, you know, there’s so many ideas in the two of them. You know, Patton says, “God help me; I love it so,” with regard to war, and Gandhi is willing to die and to encourage a lot of other people to be willing to die in service of a peaceful civil disobedience. So both things have to do with creating change. So, with Gandhi, I think Ben Kingsley’s portrait — just physically, how he looks, and the way he sounds when he’s delivering that sentient dialogue — and then Attenborough’s canvas — the visual canvas of India, the trains and all that stuff — and then, just my knowledge of the history of people pushing back against colonialism; all of those things just lift you up. They lift you up. The idea of Martin Sheen reporting back to America about what he’s seeing and the obvious lessons that are learned from these people who are willing to walk into abuse in order to make the point that they should be free — I love it because it’s like, “What can we learn from places and people around the world?” I love that. I love the international richness of it, the cultural richness."