"There’s a lot of albums and a lot of artists. There are bands or individuals in which the body of their work or an entire album would be big for me, but then, trying to think of just one track, I felt there should be something from Dylan, because I think he’s the greatest. That album John Wesley Harding, I might have listened to that more than any other Dylan and I still listen to it occasionally. I love it, and ‘All Along The Watchtower’ in particular. At that time, I hadn’t heard Jimi Hendrix do it or any other people do it, it was just this song. There’s something so dreamlike about it, something about it that feels mystical, even before I might have known the word mystical. It’s almost like the song is over without anything having happened. Or did it? I don’t know. I still don’t know. Did something happen? Did nothing happen? Of course, there’s the chord change and the sound of it. I love the whole album, how stripped down it all is, but with this song it’s the lyrics which really got me. It’s almost like remembering some words or images from a dream and it’s strongly felt, but then it can’t really be interpreted in the waking light. I was either at home or at a friend’s house when I first heard it and this probably adds to the magic of it. The album was really old and had been played so much when myself and one of the brothers closest to my age got it. To listen to it, there’s so many crackles and pops, it was almost like a fireplace is going. As I was listening to the music through all these crackling and pops and static, it was like listening to some really old thing that’s somehow getting transmitted to you."

"Then, Boogie Nights by P.T. Anderson. I loved it, kind of like for the same reason, and also because I’m very impressed by the fact you can make an artsy movie, but also a commercial one, and a popular one. It’s so rare. It’s just the most difficult thing to do, and they both did that. It’s a big inspiration for me because art films and small, independent movies are so hard to exist right now, and I think it’s very hard as a director today to feel like, can I do something free? Can I do something beautiful? Can I do something also funny but also act strong, say something about the world, but also not doing something too popular, and with some cliché subject. I feel like it’s very tricky right now to give money for a director who’s gonna have different ideas and want to do something special. So, I would say those movies, because also we need to talk about that problem right now of making small movies that don’t really exist any more, and are suffocated by those big other ones. It’s kind of scary right now."

"The first time I can remember hearing a synthesiser was sometime in the late '70s. I must have been eight or nine and I was on a driving holiday with my parents in the Pyrenees. 'I Feel Love' was on the radio and it freaked me right out. It scared me; that sequence flipped me out. 2000AD had just launched and I was really, deeply into it. All the stories were about terrifying dystopias and that song coming out of the radio sounded like a herald for one of those places. Years later, Silver Apples pushed similar buttons for me. They came about when synthesisers were more readily associated with almost academic music – people like Pierre Henry, Morton Subotnick, musique concrète stuff. Silver Apples created a sound I'd never heard before. The closest comparison (with a bit of hindsight) is something like NEU! – that driven, motorik sound. Silver Apples were before the first NEU! record by a few years. They sounded futuristic in name and sound; they built their own gear and credited the synth as a member of the band (The Simeon). There's a real toughness to the music, something very street."

"I sometimes worry that I don't like current music. I remember when I was thinking about today's interview that I was so glad this is a current album. Well, actually it's four or five years old. When I first heard this album it blew my mind – it has hit after hit. There is a conviction he has when he does things that could possibly be deemed as being cheesy or not cool and this conviction overshadows all of that and it is wholly satisfying. I knew of him before, but it was a wonderful surprise to hear this music. You hear a song like 'Round And Round' and it is epic – it's like a mini-musical with all the different parts – and everything is so intricate, be it the percussion or the different vocal parts. I think it is a masterpiece. It was really wonderful discovering him and finding that he had a trail of all these really bizarre records that he had been doing for years. You could buy all these weird albums - he was beatboxing on some of them - and I loved generally finding out all of his history. He would tour and not turn up at gigs, or just lie on the ground and shout ""I'm too ill to do this!"" and leave, or he would just turn up with a bag of mixtapes and put them in a tape machine and sing karaoke. I think there are a lot of faux eccentrics knocking around, so it is nice to find someone who is genuinely eccentric. It's satisfying to know it comes from a real place. I was lucky enough to see him play in a church in Koreatown [in Los Angeles] about eight months ago. There is always a worry when you really love a record that a gig might not be as good. He came on stage wearing leopard-print trousers and a floral shirt and carrying a basket of flowers and told us he was Little Miss Riding Hood – it was just wholly entertaining. He is a real treasure."