"His book, Black Coffee Blues, was probably the book that most influenced The Road Beneath My Feet. It was written between the late eighties and early nineties whilst Henry was on the road. The idea of writing an actual autobiography at my age seems quite repulsive to me, but tour diaries is a different thing as it’s not just about you but about the experiences and memories of playing shows around the world, both for you and the fans. Black Coffee Blues is the best book I’ve read like this and was a huge influence, both thematically and structurally."

"To Kill a Mockingbird just gets better with age. I’ve read Harper Lee’s masterpiece over and over again. It’s a great read at age 11 and 23 and 35. Recently, at 42, I took it on vacation to read again. Age changes the book, like a painting that changes when you look at it from different angles. I used to spend all my time thinking of Scout. Now I spend most of my time focused on Atticus and Tom and Boo Radley. It’s timeless and perfect; I can’t wait to share a copy with my daughters. Especially with my daughter named Harper."

"The Shawshank Redemption. The title threw me at first. Before I went to jail, I started watching [every jail movie]. That was one of them. I was trying to write a book, and I was having trouble. You know, I didn’t have the right publisher; they just wanted a book. I hooked up with this writer, a ghost writer, and he wrote a script for me, like, overnight. It was my story, but told from a bong’s point of view, and the bong gets put in federal prison. A week later the feds come in. There was some weird cosmic thing going on."

"The first Bowie album I got into and still my favourite just because it’s got so many good songs. It’s quite a long album, and he went so many different places afterwards, but that kind of version of him is the one I can most identify with. It’s almost like a greatest hits in itself with an unbelievable number of proper classics on it! One of my favourite ones is 'Kooks', which is about having a kid and being a couple of kooky and alternative parents and wondering how the fuck you’re going to bring it up."

"The Night of the Hunter was Charles Laughton?s only film as a director and its poor reception pretty much killed his directing career. It?s a remarkable debut and there?s no other film quite like it. It?s very reliant on imager from back in the days of D.W. Griffith and it?s strikingly designed and extremely dark. I saw it at a kiddie matinee when I was a child and I was just terrified. It has such a fairy tale atmosphere about it that it probably speaks more directly to children than it does to adults."

"Ha, back in the day? What first made me want to get out there and tear it up and just have fun doing it? One dude: Herbie. Nobody cracked me up like Herbie. It wasn’t about being slick, or about what tires you had, or about track conditions and temperatures and all the stuff we gotta think about these days. It was about putting on a number and having some good old-fashioned fun. I wanted to BE Herbie when I watched that for the first time! Greatest actor in the world, if you ask me."

"Starting chronologically, the oldest one, let’s say, would be To Be or Not to Be — Lubitsch — which to me is a perfect comedy. A flawless comedy with incredible wit and pace and rhythm, and a sense of humor that unfortunately disappeared in Germany, and all these wonderful directors like Lubitsch and Billy Wilder and — God knows — Fritz Lang, and everybody else left. This is such a wonderful film [about] fooling the Nazis — it’s just one of my favorites, and I think I’ve seen it probably more than 20 times. Each time I burst out in laughter, and I’m impressed by it."