"I’m a fan of Ed Norton. He had quite an amazing double act this year with Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel. I remember I read the script of Birdman at one point and I thought it was brilliant, but then when I saw his performance… I mean, it’s wonderful when you’ve read something and when you then see the performance, you go, “There’s no way anyone else could have done that but Ed Norton.” I thought he was very, very good.What I love about Birdman is that most movies — when I see movies and television shows — dramatic things happen, and then people act dramatically, and sometimes you go, “Would you really do that?” Horrible things happen all our lives; we all experience loss and death and trauma. Usually, most people, I think, we just get on with it. We don’t have a whole soliloquy in the middle of something. [laughs] You just deal with life, right? But then when you see Birdman, one of the places where it actually works is in the theater, because people are so dramatic. That’s just the way it is. So it was very true in that movie. Of course, on a technical level, that movie was just insane."

"John Barry is probably my number one, I got him to play Meltdown when I did that. I was trying to get him to play more obscure stuff from his catalogue but he wasn't into it at that point in his life. I like this album because you've got his soundtrack stuff and then you've got songs like 'Old Man Willow' that sound like Broadcast. Soundtracks don't always work as albums because they tend to repeat the theme so much that they're not that exciting to listen to, but this one doesn't do that. I think there's one song I'm not that bothered of, 'He Quit Me' at the end of side one, but it just works as an album. There was a record shop in Sheffield called Rare & Racey that only closed down a couple of years ago, you could get pretty cheap second hand records and I picked this up there and played it to death. It probably did have an influence on Pulp, I really liked the sound of it. It's not so much on this record but he used a dulcimer on The Ipcress Files soundtrack, and that definitely influenced the Pulp song 'I Spy', there was a definite attempt to make it sound like that in the background. "

"Time gets flattened out, because now we’re into the digital age. Usually, I’m quite a retro person, but my manager was one of the first people to buy an iPod, so I got one. But then I thought, When am I ever going to use that? It took me ages to take it out of the box—maybe four or five years—and then I just couldn’t see the point of carrying it around. The first song that I ever downloaded was Leonard Cohen’s “Death of a Ladies’ Man.” Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker are the two real touchstones in terms of people I’ve listened to consistently throughout my whole life. If you listen to that first Pulp record, it is just a direct rip off of his first album—though I’m not saying it was as good as that. I was very lucky to [meet Cohen] when his album Old Ideas came out. I hosted the playback of that in London, and then I interviewed him about it. I was nervous about doing that, but I’m really glad that I did. I didn’t get to know him so much, but at least I got to meet him, and I was able to tell him how much his work had meant to me."