"Again, this song is totally inspiring from a production point of view. It’s hard to choose just one song from Les Paul and Mary Ford, but this stood out. It’s a great song, despite not being a Les Paul and Mary Ford original. When people think of Les Paul they tend to think of the guitar the Gibson Les Paul, but Les Paul basically invented multi-track recording and a lot of recording techniques that so many of us use today. The stuff that he did on ‘How High The Moon’ and anything from the early ‘50s is just so, so far ahead of its time. It’s all guitar, even the drums are just him tapping his guitar and not in a cheesy, Newton Faulkner kind of way, it’s serious musicality. He was basically recording in hotel rooms, using bathrooms as echo chambers and the like. The arrangement on this track is crazy. It is a bit silly, a lot of the stuff sounds silly because it’s all plinky-plonk, all very high-pitched, mandolin-like guitars, but you’ve got to remember this was in the ‘50s. It makes Rock ‘n’ Roll, which was often just three chords, sound very unimaginative. This kind of track was jazz chords and guitar orchestra, basically. I’ve definitely robbed some of Les Paul’s techniques over the last few years. On the new record there’s some sped-up guitar, half-time drums and things like that, where you basically slow down the tape and create a whole different instrument almost. If you haven’t seen [the Les Paul documentary] Chasing Sound, I highly recommend it. It’s about how he invented the first electric guitar, using a telephone microphone and putting it on a bit of old railway track, putting and stretching a string across it and amplifying it. That was literally the birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll."

"If I had to do my top 100 movies I think 15 to 20 of them would be Woody Allen movies. This is the toughest one for me to do because the instinct is to say Annie Hall, because it’s undeniably, I think, perfect — in terms of comedy, romantic comedy specifically. It’s one that, the older I get, I feel like I continue to grow with, and I check in with it every once in a while. Depending on where I am in my life and the relationships I’ve had, I can always glean something different from it or recognize some truth in it that I’ve experienced or yet to experience. It changes every time. If I were like an evangelical, crazy born-again it would be my Bible. It’s like having an old sage friend who you don’t see very often, who’s tremendously neurotic. I also relate to him so much just as a neurotic and an over-analyzer. I fell in love with him in junior high school when, you know, you’re going through your formative years and you’re realizing certain qualities about yourself. So when I was introduced to Woody Allen it was such a relief. He made me feel like it was okay; not only could I function with neuroses but I could thrive. And certainly with women you go through so many relationship questions and struggles and it’s just nice to know someone can take all of that and create entertainment and mine those life transitions for such comedy. There’s a lot of solace in that. But I also love him on a simple comedy level — I almost love his physical comedy and his slapstick as much. So if I had to pick just one, I would say “Every movie he made in the ’70s.” [laughs]"

"The Kinks, like The Who, are one of those quintessentially great English singles bands but I’ve listened to this album so many times and I just fucking love it. It’s obviously such a big influence on Damon Albarn’s writing. You know the song ‘Big Sky’? 'Big sky, too big to cry.' You can almost hear someone shouting 'Parklife!' at the end of it, do you know what I mean? On the opening track you’ve got the lyrics mentioning all the strawberry jam, Fu Manchu, Mrs Mop and all this quintessentially English stuff, and when I started getting older so I was listening to records not just feeling them it suddenly hit me, 'These lyrics are fucking outrageous. How do you get all that stuff in there and make it work?' The album is incredible. I’ve got an old album of interviews with Ray Davies and he was saying that he thought it was important that we keep all of this traditional stuff like afternoon tea, cricket and cucumber sandwiches alive because American culture was taking over the world but he couldn’t imagine it taking over England. But then you realise… oh shit… it did. What a cunt. What a cunt. It took ages to come out because of legal shit, got delayed for three years and then no one bought it. I presented him with an award a few years ago and I thought, now’s my chance to get to know more about the writing of such a great album. So I was like, 'So Village Green, tell me about this great album…' And he’s grumpy at the best of times and just went: [snaps] 'Oh, I don’t know.' I was like, 'Ok, good to get that one sorted out finally. Nice to meet you.'"

"I’m going to go with All That Jazz for number one. It’s Bob Fosse directing a movie about himself; he changed the name to Joe Gideon from Bob Fosse. So he’s directing a movie about a musical choreographer/director who takes too many pills, sleeps with too many women, drinks too much; he’s a moviemaker who’s editing a movie while he’s doing a play and having hallucinations with musicals. It’s so unbelievable how he balances it all, and it’s Roy Scheider’s best performance, I think, ever. He’s amazing in it. It is so amazing. He’s a pretty despicable guy in the movie — I mean, he sleeps around on his girlfriend — but you love him. The doctors tell him not to take his drugs, but he does it anyway, and you still love him. You don’t blame him. And it’s sort of how Bob Fosse ended up dying, so he really forecasted his own death. I mean, he even put his girlfriend in the movie as his girlfriend — Joe Gideon’s girlfriend — and then cheated on her! Like, he had his character cheat on her. It’s so f***ing unbelievable. Just brilliant. That’s number one. That would be my, I have to say, overall all-time favorite. I’m just very impressed by that movie. It’s just really, really good. It’s got like four musical numbers in there, but they’re not like Glee. Some of them are in drug-induced hallucinations, and some of them are, he’s actually directing a musical. I’ve done plays; I’ve done one musical. But the first table read, when they’re going to put up this play, it is so like the table read on plays. I recognize so many things that they get right. Yeah, that’s my all-time favorite."

"I first heard this maybe eight or nine years ago. It was a new record for me in terms of it being something that I hadn't heard in my teens but as soon as I heard it I really liked it. I like the sound of it and the delivery of the vocals. It felt very throwaway and raw and instinctive and in the moment, which is brilliant. And then hearing more the story behind it and, as I understand it, I think it was their dad getting them out of trouble saying: 'Look, I've got a studio with loads of instruments. Just go in there and stay off the streets and out of trouble and see what you can do.' And then they made, with the help of a few people hanging around, this mad record that ended up being one of the most sampled records of all time. I'm not that good about nerding up about records, as you may have gathered, but I hear little snippets and I love that story. I think it's brilliant. And I gravitate to records that are instinctive and not too forced and it feels like a record where these girls are just enjoying themselves and having fun with these beats."