"I found out about them from a friend in high school between my junior and senior year. He didn't know how to describe them except it sort of sounded like The Rolling Stones. I listened and I didn't hear that. It had that rootsiness to it maybe and that slight psychedelicness to it. I've listened to this album thousands of times but I don't have all of their records and I don't know what came before or after, but I do love this one. It's just a vibe the entire time. I remember being with that guy who told me about them on our way to high school one day. We were supposed to be at school at 8:30 in the morning and we met at 7:30 in the morning under some bridge to drink beer before we went to school. This is what we were listening to. I only did that once and it wasn't as fun as it sounded. But it was definitely a moment and it always stuck with me. It was a sunny day, cool out, probably a Thursday or Friday, long day of school ahead of us and we're kicking back drinking stolen beer in someone's car under bridge listing to The Perfect Prescription."

"I'm not a very religious guy but I suppose if I were I might like the Om cover. It's ok. I love the record though, it's really excellent. I've no idea when I first encountered it. I think I might have heard it before I heard Sleep. It's got a very cool atmosphere. I enjoy listening to atmospheres as much as songs when it comes to albums and I think this one is hard to beat for that. You can put it on whenever you want and it's always going to sound great coming out of your stereo. I listen to it a lot, especially when I'm at home. As a sideline when talking about record sleeves I really hate and completely ruined the album for me, it's not the Om sleeve. It's the sleeve of their previous band Sleep. Jerusalem or Dopesmoker - that's one of my favourite albums of all time but it's also one of my least favourite record sleeves. There's a lot of smoking weed involved and I guess that's something that I think is kind of lame in album artwork. There's just something kind of cliched about it. There's one of an astronaut hot-boxing his spacesuit which is very tasteful."

"It’s like a monolith to me, that movie. Every time it’s re-shown in theaters, I always go. Star Wars was a big hit in 1977 which created a big sci-fi boom. So 2001 came to Japan, and I saw it in theaters when I was in middle school. Before experiencing that, I was just listening to radio dramas. I read the original novel, but the movie was totally different. I didn’t really understand it the first time. Now, I have a different interpretation every time I watch it. As a creator, I have periods of difficult times, but whenever I feel particularly in need of a pick-me-up, I watch 2001. It’s a perfect movie for me. It was a real space experience. Exploration even before man went to the moon. I always wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid, but Japan doesn’t have NASA. You had to go either to USSR or China. Although I felt like I had to give up on the dream of becoming an astronaut, when I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, I felt like I really went to outer space. It’s a life-changing movie because it made me feel like I accomplished a dream."

"I was on a panel at NYU a few years ago with Larson and enjoyed immensely listening to him talk about his craft. I’m also a Winston Churchill junkie, having recently finished Andrew Roberts’ 800-plus-page juggernaut. But this is a Churchill largely unseen in other works. It focuses on a finite time period as Britain, the last country standing after France falls, desperately tries to not just hang on until Churchill can convince the Yanks to join the fray, but to take the fight to Hitler. Larson has drawn on new material, some just recently released, to build upon the legendary status of a man who did enough during his life to justify three lives. The only historical figure who might have rivaled him in the energy and “nine lives of a cat” persona was Theodore Roosevelt. This book will reinforce many things you might have already known about the Second World War and Churchill’s place in it. But you will also learn many new things about that man and that time period that will compel you to find out more. A thoughtful, at times part funny and horrific, and scintillating read that I would recommend to all."

"That was one of those movies I saw and it’s… I’m sure that there are movies that are more important, you know? But it was one of those movies that I saw, and it was just perfect, if that makes sense. It’s like all movies are like listening to a bunch of different instruments playing at the same time, and suddenly they all sync up for certain moments, and there’s other times where it’s not quite in rhythm. JCVD was just bang-on the entire time. It was just so lean and solid and this perfect blend of dark humor and some really genuinely touching moments. That moment when he goes up into the loft and it’s all very surreal, and he’s crying, I was like, “This is for real, man. This has really got me.” It’s such a beautiful thing when you’re watching a movie and if somebody told you, “Oh, he’s about to start crying and you’re about to get really emotional in five minutes,” that you would go “No way. Come on, it’s not that kind of movie,” or it’s gonna feel really forced and it’s not gonna work, and they manage to take you there. That’s so impressive."

"""I think I fell in love with this record when I first heard 'Personal Jesus', which was a big single in the US. I love the sound of this record. There's no band playing live, rocking out in a room; you can tell that they're sitting in front of their keyboards or drum machine and making the record one finger at a time. Yet somehow it's got this amazing soul, with a clean technical sound and the vocals are so powerful. It's one of those records for me. I used to always put it on in the car, particularly when it was raining and I had to drive somewhere and the window wipers were going back and forth. Till this day, whenever I put that record on, that’s what I can immediately think of: driving in the rain and listening to that record over and over again. I dunno if the rest of Garbage would necessarily put Violator on but we were playing it backstage at one of the shows the other night and Shirley was singing along. I think she said, ""I always forget how much I love these guys, they're a guilty pleasure of mine"". The same could be said about Duke and Steve too but I’m probably the biggest fan."

"Again, her whole catalogue is amazing. I love her music back to front. This is her hit record, as it were, not that it was a proper hit unfortunately. It's been with me for a while and I love it so much. We brought a few pieces of music to listen to while my wife was giving birth to our daughter and this was one of them. That gives an indication of how embedded in my life it is. The tone and mood it sets... She was deep into that sense of spiritual connectedness and universal love. I understand how people who aren't necessarily spiritual might see it as a foolish hippy diversion, but for me, this unlocks the potential of what music can do. At the time it was married to a political agenda, same for all these spiritual free jazz records, and I feel that it's a really unfortunate thing that people don't seem to be able to articulate that so well in the contemporary music world. This is an analysis and that's not why I love it, that's because when I put it on it's my favourite thing to be listening to. But it also stands up to analysis - there's so many reasons to love this music."

"Like I mentioned I love the desert. I have a video somewhere of my wife and I listening to this record driving in Joshua Tree. It really does sound like how it looks. To be honest, I knew of the soundtrack long before I saw the film. And that's how it is for me with a lot of Morricone scores. I went through a deep Morricone phase in my twenties, and just any soundtrack he ever did I bought. The movie's already there – you can see it. And I bet he would agree too – a lot of his music is far more cinematic than the films he's actually scored. He has this intense visual element to his music which is always exciting to hear. So that record in particular, I remember I first heard it in my twenties and it really blew my mind. The production – the fact that it is so produced – sure it's a recording from the 60s or something. But it is a studio album. So you hear him getting really great sounding recordings in some old-school microphone (old-school now). Really getting such a rich, beautiful sound. And then you get that fuzz effect, which is just quintessential Morricone sound, probably because of this record."