"To me, these are the two best resistance films ever made. And each is its director’s best film. I saw them very early, and they were very formative for me. They really show the complex nature of resistance, glorifying it but also showing the compromises you have to make when you’re in wartime. I love that The Battle of Algiers starts off with that line: “None of this is documentary footage.” What audacity to be like: this is going to feel and look so real that you’re going to think this is a documentary, so I need to tell you that it’s not. It’s a way of setting the bar so high, and then the film lives up to it and surpasses it! You feel the ambition in all of it. It’s just spectacular in every sense of the word. Army of Shadows is similar, though obviously it’s much more in Melville’s cinematic language. Something that has always struck me is that by the end of the film everyone does exactly what you would expect them to do, what they’re supposed to do, but it still just leads to fucked-up situations. It’s this real mess of an ending, but it’s all grounded in very real decisions that I can sympathize with across the board. It’s rare to see a film that gets to the humanity of every decision, to the point where they’re lived-in, not just plot points."

"I first heard this maybe eight or nine years ago. It was a new record for me in terms of it being something that I hadn't heard in my teens but as soon as I heard it I really liked it. I like the sound of it and the delivery of the vocals. It felt very throwaway and raw and instinctive and in the moment, which is brilliant. And then hearing more the story behind it and, as I understand it, I think it was their dad getting them out of trouble saying: 'Look, I've got a studio with loads of instruments. Just go in there and stay off the streets and out of trouble and see what you can do.' And then they made, with the help of a few people hanging around, this mad record that ended up being one of the most sampled records of all time. I'm not that good about nerding up about records, as you may have gathered, but I hear little snippets and I love that story. I think it's brilliant. And I gravitate to records that are instinctive and not too forced and it feels like a record where these girls are just enjoying themselves and having fun with these beats."

"It's just the way that they manage to get so much done in such a short space of time. It's three minutes. Change. Two minutes. Change. But they manage to get all of these beautiful things to happen, and I think you can sense that something amazing is about to happen. With the transition in British pop music at the time, it was losing a lot of the peace and love and starting to get quite moody. It reflected a lot of things that were happening, or at least on the horizon, at the time. The economy, the Vietnam war, the Troubles in Ireland, all of these different things. You could sense that something was happening to The Beatles on Revolver. It was exciting for me as well, because the stuff on this album is a long way off from 'She Loves You'. It was all quite mature and sophisticated. From day one I was a Beatles fan though. Those tunes are infectious and it's impossible not to like them. There's just something about their instant communication that I really love. I still listen to them now, and I find their music very inspiring. They were a direct influence on 'Breaking The Law' and 'Living After Midnight'. Those two songs are straight out of the Beatles songbook as far as simplicity and getting to the point goes. Short, little songs that sail away in a short space of time and are packed with hooks, melody and riffs."