"I think my fifth choice will blow you away. At a time in my life when I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to pursue, and I had a feeling I wanted to pursue acting as a career, one of the films that really hit me hard emotionally that made me feel pushed that way was An Officer and a Gentleman, with Richard Gere. There was just something about that film that had such a profound effect on me. The line,”I have no place else to go,” that he yells up at Lou Gossett, Jr. resonated. I love that film for the emotional impact it had on me. It’s an amazing film."

"Berlin, for me, is one of the most complete albums. It incorporates and encapsulates everything I love about albums and music, which for me is it being like a film that plays out in your mind. There's a sort of cinematic aspect to the whole thing. It's storytelling in its darkest and most beautiful form, it takes you through a relationship from the beginning to the end and you get invested in characters and people that are inhabiting the scenery that Lou Reed's talking about. You feel pain, in the end, when it's: "They're taking her children away / Because they said she was not a good mother". Those lyrics, and "this is the place our children were conceived / Candles lit the room brightly at night" and "this is the place where she cut her wrists / That odd and fateful night". It's just like, fuck me, who actually talks about that stuff any more? Who's brave enough to believe in the album as a whole? Because you take out any of those songs, and they're fantastic songs, but the whole point is it's a novel, and you have to invest in listening to the lyrics and absorbing the atmosphere and going with it the whole way through to really get that fucking hit at the end, where you're just devastated. The full entity, that's the album I wish I'd made. My boyfriend for seven years, when I was 18 to 25, was obsessed with Lou Reed and we saw him loads of times. He probably played it to me quite early on, maybe when I was 19 or 20, but I think I actually got obsessed with it on my own around 23, and just listened to it over and over again. And then luckily, it got brought back live and he toured it with the full children's choir and bloody string section in his band. It was such a treat to see that. In 'The Kids', they put all the samples of the children going "mummy!" and crying and banging on the door. Apparently they actually locked someone's kids in a room and recorded them, sobbing away. [laughs] Absolute bastard, you know, but what have you got to do for the arts? That really struck me at the time, thinking how much I love film and whenever I write music, I see it, in characters and colours and locations and places, and it's like they had, like lots of other people I suppose. There are so many songs by him that I love, but I wouldn't say there are any albums by him that I love the whole way through as much as this one. Obviously there's 'Satellite Of Love' and 'Perfect Day' and 'Walk On The Wild Side', which I think are fantastic pop songs because they've got grit - when I think about great songs that have darkness and grit and integrity, I think of Lou Reed and Kurt Cobain, and those are my two men that I reference. When I was writing 'Laura', I was like "okay, Lou", can I summon the spirit of Lou? Just to be able to talk brutally and honestly about a thing, but within a context of a song that people will remember. It's just in my DNA now, always with me, it's just part of me."

"The irony about Berlin is that it was delivered as a concept album, but its component parts are from all over the place. The earliest songs off it are demos for the Velvet Underground. It's intriguing because 'Berlin' the song is from his first solo album, and then you've got 'Stephanie Says' [from VU] which has been changed to 'Caroline Says I'. He rejigged everything and came up with a concept album, but it's a hodge podge really. I interviewed him about Berlin and just about got away with it because I love the album. And I don't think it would have been as good if Bob Ezrin hadn't been producer. As much as David Bowie and Mick Ronson turned Transformer into the album it is, Bob Ezrin turned Berlin into the album that it is. The story goes that Bob Ezrin told his own kids that their mum had died just so he could record them crying for the album, and then when he had that on tape he told them, nah, she's alright really, I just made it up. That's what I heard anyway. You want to know why Lou Reed punched David Bowie that time? Well, I heard it was because Bowie offered to produce Berlin, but on the condition that Reed quit heroin. But Berlin is just an amazing album, especially coming straight off the back of Transformer, and you can tell that Lou Reed is not comfortable with being a pop star as presented by David Bowie. Somebody like Lou Reed [who] actually did reinvent the wheel – with some help from John Cale – with the Velvet Underground, and then one of his acolytes is seen to be helping him on his way. He was probably smarting a little bit from that. Really, Berlin shouldn't have worked, it was constructed from waifs and strays, but it has that great production with all the brass on it. 'Sad Song' is so beautiful. It's probably the most beautiful song you'll hear in your life."