"And Labyrinth. Labyrinth was sort of the same… Loved Labyrinth. I watched it again recently and had a total adult crush on David Bowie. I used to just think he was cool, and now I’m like, “Oh my God, he’s so hot in that movie.” So 80s and glam rock. And I think both of those movies are sort of, really so fancy, but there was something… I don’t know. To me, I didn’t feel like I was suspending reality. It just was like, “That’s the world this movie exists in, and I want to be in it,” you know what I mean? I just love both of those movies."

"My son listens to Frank Ocean, so I started listening to this through him. I started with listening to Channel Orange and I thought that was fucking amazing. At first I was displaced by the thin-sounding R&B American-ness of it, but when you get into it you realise it’s brilliant. What I like about it is the nature of what Frank Ocean’s singing about, his little introspective vanity subjects. He doesn’t go outwards, like ‘the big wave’s gonna crush us, save the animals’, he just talks about vain things. It’s good. It’s brilliant actually. He’s just a really weird guy singing about weird subjects. There’s that tune ‘Super Rich Kids’, which is just fucking brilliant. ‘Too many bottles of this wine we can’t pronounce’, there’s little moments of discomfort like that, turned into a chorus. I much prefer that to someone’s big treatise about, I don’t know, Assad. Or the coronavirus."

"I’ll just drop The Weeknd House of Balloons, which I call black Portishead. [Laughs] It’s like, ‘Who is this dude? This can’t be a real person, right?’ That echo just seems like it was recorded—or wasn’t recorded—in some black hole and it was a sound just coming out and it just sucked you in. I could listen to that album 200 million times over and it still sounds fresh every time. “To me, the lyrical content—I don’t know how much it means to him, as far as personally. But, I’m a guy that listens to David Bowie who was like, “Yo, your mom doesn’t know if you are a boy or a girl.” Just saying stuff—shocking, but I don’t know if it’s for shock’s sake. I’m sure he is not trying to do that. But it doesn’t sway me from the music. ‘Yeah, come over, I’ll get you real high and I’ll fuck you and maybe never call you again.’ To me, he is telling a story and we have all seen the movie Seven. That doesn’t mean he beat him and barbed-wired his ankle to a chair and his whole stomach explodes. But it’s fascinating"

"I just rewatched it a little while ago. With Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. I thought that was incredible. A love story with, again, layers of intricacy and just figuring out all these little details. It was also the first time I saw Jim Carrey when he wasn’t being funny or doing a comedy, and that really pulled me in. I was like, “Wait what’s this?” I was captivated."

"Nobody had been doing intricacy and harmony, arrangements and detail in the recording studio as much as Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys. He just made us all think again, certainly to stand up and listen again too, just like The Beatles did with Sgt. Peppers. Pet Sounds was also influential in my career because Mike Hurst, the producer who discovered me if you like, was absolutely infected with this album. So when it came to recording me, he tried his best to make it sound like Pet Sounds. That’s why I have such large arrangements in my early songs. It was not really something that was connected to me, but rather to that record, so it was quite interesting about the history of that."

"Beastie Boys and David Bowie are two of my favorite artists. The David Bowie album I am going to choose is Scary Monsters, which is kind of different. He always reinvented himself and he was doing something in the 1980s with Scary Monsters that nobody was doing. You can kind of hear stuff on that album that a lot of groups are doing now like, 'Aw, yeah I know where you got that from. That’s off that album.' It’s not one of his most popular albums to everybody, but I think it’s my favorite. There was a song on that, ‘Teenage Wildlife,’ and if you don’t like that, we don’t have to associate with each other. If you don’t get that song—it's cool man, I’ll see you around. “‘Teenage Wildlife’ is just epic. It’s like five or six minutes long and it kind of crescendos and builds into this insane vocal of Bowie wailing. I think I would pay $5,000 dollars to see footage of that recording session. I don’t know how he hits the notes that he’s doing and how long he does it but he’s just belting it out. You know he was feeling something when he was doing it. It’s just a cool song."