"I’d just say Greatest Hits, if we’re making a list of albums to turn people on, a greatest hits will do fine. Some of that music I listened to when I was nine to thirteen did not stand the test of time, but Sly and the Family Stone is kind of ridiculous in how good it is. Songs, musicianship, just fucking weirdness, sound and ‘how the fuck’; again - as I was saying about 1999 – you’re just scratching your head, like, ""how did this happen?"" If you play in a band and you’re young and you haven’t listened to Sly and the Family Stone, then your band is gonna fucking suck [laughs]. Probably not a true statement, but to me it is. I grew up in the seventies so I’d hear these stories, like he didn’t turn up to his gig, he was four hours late to the gig... I mean they were huge but it was just willy nilly live. I would say the influences on my bass playing was a really wide thing, I didn’t really decide I was going to be a bass player until I was 19, 20. I was playing drums, I was playing guitar, I was playing bass and when I finally took that big step and said, ""okay, I’m going to be a bass player"" and I kind of melded a load of things together. The band Magazine, that bass sound with the chorus on the bass... it took me some years to work out that effect, 'cos I didn’t know much about effects in the eighties, but the sound you hear with Guns is really derived from listening to that first Magazine record, combined with first Sly and the Family Stone and Prince, with a real punk rock ethic underlining the whole thing."

"Well the next one is less action oriented. This is where I began to struggle. Because I had my first four and was like, “Okay, that’s perfect,” and then I had to pick another one. This decision is a bit tough; there’s a three way tie for this, I should say. I’m going to pick The Conversation with Gene Hackman and John Cazale. And the reason I’m thinking this is, I did a movie with Anthony Hopkins called The Rite, and the director of photography — we talked a bit. And he really wanted to have that ’70s feel and stuff — it’s when they just started to use the zoom lens for the first time, and how innovative it was. And then in the 1980s, it became overused and used for the wrong reasons and all that kind of stuff. The Conversation is one that, if you watch The Conversation for the opening sequence where you hear a conversation taking place as the master — this zoom from way up is zooming in over a park. And I was just absolutely blown away by it because you can hear exactly what’s happening, but you don’t see. You’ve got no idea who’s talking. You don’t know where they are or what’s happening. I was blown away. And Gene Hackman is one of my favorite actors. I just think he’s incredible; I could watch him read the phone book. I could watch him pretty much not do anything [laughing]. You just wonder what’s going on in his mind. He’s one of those actors who is saying one thing, but you know there’s so many different things going on inside of his head. You just never know exactly what it is and stuff. I love that. I love being kept guessing. Francis Ford Coppola is one of the greatest directors of all time, and what I thought was great was that it sort of embodies that period of time. Even though it was made in the ’70s and it’s a very specific ’70s movie, I think it’s very, very particular to today. You know, with surveillance and all that kind of stuff. And I just think the whole idea of it is incredible, and it’s just so well made."

"How about a comedy? The Devil Wears Prada. I love that film. I love Meryl Streep, along with the rest of the world. She’s the bad guy in this film, so to watch Meryl play a bad guy with all of the layering and the subtlety, still you love her in the end. It’s just wonderful. I love the couple of speeches in there ? Stanley Tucci has a couple of speeches in there, one of which is to Anne Hathaway. Anne comes in to him and tells him, couldn’t she be given credit for trying? And he goes off on her about the value of trying and whether, in fact, she does deserve credit for trying. Great, great speech. Then the other speech I love is the one about the blue sweater, where Anne Hathaway thinks she’s underplaying her fashion sense by wearing sort of nondescript, underplayed, like she?s not going to be one of these fashionistas, and Meryl Streep goes off on her about how many hours were put in by designers crafting the kind of underplayed, nondescript look that often people are… they try to represent themselves by looking like they don’t care about how they look, and they just kind of throw something together. She goes off about this blue sweater that Anne Hathaway’s wearing, and I just thought that was brilliant, and in the mouth of Meryl Streep, it was even more on the mark."

"Robert Ashley is famous for having made these so-called operas, a lot of them were for TV. He works with the voice in these really great ways. I love this record because you don't know exactly what's going on: there's a lot of mystery. You have to piece together what's going on within the minutiae of the musical environment. Or you don't and you just listen and enjoy it. The sounds are very beautiful. Ther's a distant organ in the background just playing this one chord and you can also hear a bass. You can hear this woman whispering in French but you can barely hear her. Then this male singer appears but there's some crazy modulation on his voice. So all these crazy elements combine to create this crazy environment that you want to listen to for maybe ten minutes, because it's not like a song but it's got the elements of a song: you've got a bassline, you've got these instruments playing harmonies and you have voices. But you can't tell what's going on. It has an atmosphere. The album is called Automatic Writing but the track I'm talking about here, specifically, is called 'Automatic Writing'. It's important for me because it reinforced this idea that you could put beauty into music without necessarily using sweet melodies or whatever. I do have that in my music, but I also like the drama that can come from just… voices."

"This is another case of, "Where's my Radiohead gone?" Hearing Muse for the first time was like, "Holy shit, this is like Radiohead, but heavier, and more pop, but also darker as well", and I just absolutely fell for it, hook, line and sinker. I was at the perfect age, was just getting into actually being good at playing stuff, and Matt Bellamy was all over the place in terms of his musical talents, playing the piano and guitar, and stuff that teenagers love. Stuff that sounds flashy and complex and twiddly but is actually not. And the bass player! Fuck me, the basslines on the album! Bass players don't do that kind of stuff! He's the sort of main character in an awful lot of those songs. It was an absolute revelation. I was a bass player before I was anything else, and I remember thinking, "Holy shit that sounded ace"! They ripped up the rulebook in so many ways for rock music. It was so enjoyable as well. Every song had a real sense of performance and razzmatazz. Of course it's called Showbiz and it is a type of show. So I think, more than anything, that's probably what you would say about my band, particularly live - we're not subtle, it's over the top. Whether people like it or not, that's got into us now and it's hard to take a step back."