"Violent Femmes was a huge high-school record. I probably got it when I was 14 or 15. I just played the entire album on stage with [Femmes bassist] Brian Ritchie, Brian from the Dresden Dolls and [Bad Seed] Mick Harvey, so I found myself revisiting the record and my early experiences of it. The one thing I remembered was that when I heard that record for the first time, I thought Gordon Gano was a girl. But really sexy! The songs were so sexy and raw and filled with beautiful, actually relatable teenage angst. The music and the production was all so immediate. My cool friends and my older brother were all listening to punk. I tried to be cool and tried to like the Sex Pistols, but I just couldn't get into the records. There just wasn't enough song there for me. But the Violent Femmes was like punk music that my brain could actually follow. I played that tape into the ground, just a non-stop soundtrack. Another thing I realised revisiting it was there's just not a bad song on that record, not a single moment that isn't essential. There's not two seconds of filler."

"A Clockwork Orange I’ve seen about 35 times. I remember first seeing that and I certainly didn’t get half the movie, but when I was young, I just thought it was just kind of weird and strange and I really appreciated it as I got a little older and saw it more often and more often. Then it became this sort of like a party background movie, something that just became part of my life. I certainly appreciated the language. Not profanity or anything but its own language, and the visual of it, I really appreciated the visual, because the visual is such a storytelling part of it and the language was so bizarre in its own kind of language. I really appreciate the work that goes into that. This is more like a highbrow sort of snobby film pick, but a sick demented sense of humor is kind in that movie as well. Ultimately it’s the visual storytelling and the language that I thought was so tremendous. It’s an absolute acid-trip fantasy weird thing. I never did drugs growing up because I watched Clockwork Orange enough so I didn’t have to do drugs. There’s a lot of shock value to it, but I really appreciated it for that. It was really kind of interesting for me and it all was put together in a very smart way, I believe. It’s not just sensationalism or anything like that because that kind of s— bothers me. But anyway, there’s a lot of things in that movie that I really like and appreciated. it really well in that film."

"Why? Well, I think it’s an act of freedom, the whole entire movie, practically. They didn’t have a script. In 1962, which is the year when the movie was shot, I thought it was unbelievable that somebody would just go into an experiment like that. It’s still a very experimental movie, very emotional in a way. I like what he says about the human spirit and creation; in a way, crisis of a man confronting life, his past, his present and his future in a very formal way. I mean formal in terms of format, how the movie was told, not only in the content of the movie, which is amazing. Also in the way that he decided to just do it absolutely free, inventing new rules for telling a story and not going in a traditional way. I thought it was the masterpiece of Federico Fellini that most attracted me; I feel very proud that I know [what it’s like for] a guy like Federico Fellini, who got the balls to just jump into such believable, reflections of mirrors, you know, inside the movie."

"I grew up watching western films, and for someone to slow down the pacing to a sort of a western drama — I just thought was so incredibly well done. The acting in it was absolutely phenomenal. The cinematography of it was beautiful. The tone, the production — just everything about it. Go down the list of everything about all the departments of a film and I feel like everybody nailed it on that one — just knocked it out of the park. It’s just such a beautiful piece of film to watch. Sometimes I like to just play it in the background with the volume off — just to be looking at the imagery of it. Oh, man. Watch it with the lights off. It’s awesome."

"The next I would say is La Strada because, well, do I really have to say? I feel like it’s sort of self-explanatory. Like [laughs] Giulietta Masina, I mean every performance, but particularly the last scene in the movie, with Anthony Quinn and just being on the beach, and everything about that movie is beautiful. And there’s something always about his films that, knowing that audio was recorded post shooting the film — I’m pretty sure that’s true with that movie — just to know, in a way, if it is true, it’s just to know that there are two sort of performances happening simultaneously. You can see and hear that. And I love that idea and what skill and sort of the presence to this day that movie has. And it’s also personally really resonant because my father said after he saw that movie, it was what made him want to make movies, and when I finally saw it when I was a teenager, I understood why. So it inevitably has a resonance beyond the brilliance of the movie itself."

"This isn't part of any phase in my life. I just heard it on Peel, and it had this "gathering of the tribes" time signature - not sure if that's true or not, but it's such a strange record. The delivery... the first line, "Saw her face in the window, it looks quite strange..." That's brilliant. And it's like an odd, surreal miniature. I don't know what it is that makes me like it so much. The chorus goes, "I just can't believe that looking over you, I find you appealing, but it seems that I do." That sums up the way I feel about the record. It's not a pretty record, but I love it."

"I stole that from my brother. I was like, ‘What is this?’ I was in seventh grade or eighth grade and it was another album where it kind of takes you somewhere. You are like, This isn’t human. This was just dropped by a spaceship and it’s not a person singing this song or creating these beats. This is just a space alien.’ Portishead’s production is just insane beats you would expect to be on a KRS-One album. But then there's this little white girl with an angel voice singing over it. It was a cool juxtaposition. I like ‘It’s A Fire.’ That’s a chill song with kind of a military drum thing going on, like a drummer boy."