"“I’m not typically interested in poetry, but I discovered The Flowers of Evil in high school as I was just becoming a goth and getting into Trent Reznor – and everyone else was getting into the Beat poets, who I find comparably boring if we’re going to discuss druggy, surrealist poetry. This work is so visceral, filthy and gorgeously written. It feels like a distillation of the opium scenes from Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, but more abstract and extensively documented. This one poem is just a disgusting, sexual description of a corpse that is permanently burned into my mind.”"

"That’s another great sprawling big epic that follows various episodes in the life of Andrei Rublev, who was an icon painter in probably the 15th or 16th century — I’m not sure — and just various episodes in his life. I mean, he hardly features in many of them. He’s just an observer of a lot of this, but it’s magnificent. You really, really get a feel for what it might have been like to live in medieval Russia. It’s much more approachable than some of [Andrei] Tarkovsky‘s work. I absolutely adore it and watch it again and again."

"Who hasn't had the discussion of favourite Bowie albums? And I always go for this one. There's so much behind it in terms of knowing that just weeks or months before it, Bowie had met Mick Ronson and you know that this is a very new relationship and what Bowie had just come from. And it's kind of like the birth of The Spiders From Mars. It's quite complex in a way and I feel everything around it and the importance of that record. I guess that at the time this must have been quite a mental album for people to hear; it must have been quite insane. You know, like: 'What the fuck has Bowie done?' It's this really dark, fucked-up record and that plays a massive part in how I feel about it. I feel the same way about 2001: A Space Odyssey which I saw again the other day for the first time in about 15 years. And I wonder how it must've been for people when they saw it first time around. Sci-fi back then was kind of cheesy, low-budget B-movie shit and suddenly this movie comes out that's a complete change in direction with this seriousness, and gravitas, and coldness and it's not very inviting. And that's how I feel about The Man Who Sold The World. It was Bowie's 2001 at a time when people weren't used to that or ready for that. There's the darkness and the depth and, of course, there's the beauty. 'After All' is a beautiful song and very tender. It's like the birth of so much really."