"I just recently saw Slacker, actually, within maybe the last year and a half. It definitely marked a certain bracket of youth at that time—and more specifically, Austin. But I love the way he captured this lackadaisical, lethargic driftiness, and conversations and characters and life. I love that trick where people are just talking and walking down the street, and then suddenly someone walks out to get something from the mailbox or something and the camera just stays with them and it becomes their story for a moment. That structure totally fascinated me. Even when I was in Seattle in the ’90s, that idea of people just hanging out, and you don’t even know what you’re doing, you’re just spending time with people and talking philosophy, but it’s not really going anywhere. You’re just talking about things to talk about things, and I really identified with that. I’m surprised I didn’t see it back then. I’ve walked around Austin and done nothing and just had some random conversations with strangers and that spirit still exists there, to a certain extent. It’s not what people who are productive members of society would say is a good way to spend time, but I actually think nowadays that’s kind of a premium. I would like more of that in my life at this point, because just the overstimulation and how much information is pouring in constantly is ridiculous and also kind of false. There’s this sense of urgency and importance that we have with time. And a lot of it has to do with technology and the culture that builds around that. But I think a movie like Slacker is hard for people to watch these days. Their attention spans are much shorter, and Slacker is the antithesis. Many of the movies in the Criterion Collection are atmospheric, and sometimes people are like, “I don’t know what to do with this.” But to relax into it and use that as an example of another way of existing, I think, is important. So Slacker both reminded me of a time period and also kind of reminded me of the importance of that way of being."

"I've been a Cope fan since I was 15. He was a guy that nobody else was into, at least in my town - I'm from Temple, Texas. When you're that age and there's something you know about that you love obsessively and no one else is into it, it becomes a personal thing. I had all the records. It seemed like every time I would go down to Austin and went down to Sound Exchange there would always be a new Julian Cope record. Something older that I had never heard before or something new he was putting out that was not a main release but sort of a side release or he was releasing it itself. It sort of fed the obsession a bit. And then he was really into The 13 Floor Elevators and The 13 Floor Elevators were from Austin and then he put out a record called Droolian which had an Austin PO Box on the back and I didn't understand why that was. He wasn't here but somehow it had an Austin PO Box. I had a weird personal connections to those records. Out of all of his records, why pick Jehovahkill? I picked that one because that to me is the peak of his experimentation. It's also really great songwriting. It's a very, very kraut-influenced record. it's an expansive record. It was three sides. Not a full double album but it was three sides and on the fourth side you had an etching. He was always doing things like that. He was putting thought into it. He was the first artist I ever listened to that ran music in the run out grooves of the record. He wrote little inscriptions in the run out grooves of the record and there was all these hints and mysteries and all that stuff adds up to something. I'm not sure what right now but at the time I was just obsessed. I used to cover 'Upwards at 45 degrees' at solo shows, it's a great one. "

"When she did the video of 'Rehab', I thought 'Jesus, what is that?' - again, that initial thing... I thought, 'shit, she sounds tremendous, who is this kid?' And it looked great, and the arrangement was great and the whole package was great, and I had to get the album. So I got the CD and it just got better and better. You hear her getting into the ballad, 'Love Is A Losing Game' - that's like a standard, that comes from a jazz standard, something one of the old jazzers would have done, that's how good that is. She nails the shit out if it. The whole album is tremendous, and it's just a shame - making an album like that and then nothing. The band I take on the road with me is the same brass section that she used to use. So when she died, we were in France and I saw it on BBC news, and I came down to the bar that night and I said 'my God, how did that happen? She must have thought she was indestructible', and they said the opposite - she had loved living on the edge apparently, it was that thing of danger, that's what they felt. I wish I'd met her and had a chance to sing with her because she had a lot to offer, and she had a great spirit and what she sang was tremendous. I would have loved to duet. When you record something was somebody, it lasts forever, and if you haven't, it's a shame. It's a shame that it [drug addiction] happened to her so early. With Whitney Houston, she's left a wealth of material to listen to, but Amy Winehouse, I know she did an album before that, but Back To Black is tremendous, you just think 'shit!' Just waiting for the next, and now there is no next and it's a bloody shame. The drug thing, it never appealed to me. Sniffing cocaine, I know what it does. For singers, it's death - it gets on your vocal chords, it's bad news. Burns your bloody nose out. I've never taken any drugs. The only thing I took was at the beginning, purple hearts, because I was doing so many shows and I was getting tired. I think it was Viv Prince, who used to be a drummer with The Pretty Things, who said, 'try one of these, that'll keep you awake', but then I realised you couldn't go to sleep! So that was a short-lived thing. And I'll take a sleeping pill when I've got to go to sleep and I know I need to get up, but mild ones, nothing heavy, because I don't want anything to get in the way of what I do. And when I've gone a little too far drinking and I think 'oh shit, I've got to get up tomorrow', then you see it, and you think 'you fucking idiot! You stretched it too far last night'. So you do that enough times and you learn, but some people don't learn."

"Well, I think one thing is I love seeing the 15th century in black and white, in the 20th century. The physical imagery… that scene in the balloon at the beginning of the movie, the way that it’s cut together and the way that it functions and what he’s looking at. The sound, the music. Tarkovsky is one of my favorite directors and I think there’s just a great abstract quality in his films, where you see something and, as you’re looking at it, it transforms in front of your eyes. Things happen that you can’t believe you’re looking at — a horse falling down a flight of stairs; all of a sudden there’s a moment where you’ve got Christ, in the snow, carrying his cross up a hill. The kind of subliminal violence that occurs — when this guy gouges the eyes out of one of those journeymen, artisans that are leaving the reconstruction of a church; the apathy in the violence reminds me of the W.H. Auden poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts.” The old masters, they really knew about human suffering. And I guess in that particular film, what I’m thinking about is the length of the takes, and the surprise of what you actually see being filmed. The way slow motion is used in that movie also; the way that movies are not like that anymore. The scale and the depth of field of what you’re seeing is vast. So there’s a poetic quality to that. I’d have to mention The Passenger also, because there’s a moment when Antonioni has Jack Nicholson sticking his arms outside of a cable car, and for that moment you just have this sense of observing observation — that’s a big part of moviemaking to me, or painting. That kind of filmmaking, where the camera is still but everything around it is moving, and moving at different speeds, is something that I’m attracted to."

"‘Autonomy’ was a massive wakeup call for me. I bought the album the day it came out, I got the bus after school and it was in a silver plastic bag. When I got home and put it on I knew the singles, but when I got to ‘Autonomy’ it was genuinely a new kind of rock music. “There’s no way I can ever separate the fact that I was aware it was from my town. If it had been from Düsseldorf I would have been mind blown, but I was more mind blown it was from Manchester, because it could have been from Düsseldorf. I knew it couldn’t have been from Los Angeles and sounded like The Doobie Brothers, Fleetwood Mac or Jackson Browne and knowing it now I don’t think it could have come from London. “London at that time was very dominated by the sound of The Clash and The Pistols and in spite of what people like to say it was quite testosteroney and straight, certainly compared to the Buzzcocks and Magazine. Wire were a different matter, they had an arch femininity and an intellectual aspect about them, but Buzzcocks sounded like my environment, in much the same way Joy Division were going to a year later, the way The Smiths did a few years after that and the way The Fall did. “I might have been projecting, but when I put it all together it sounded so modern and so Manchester and it gave me an insight into my city, modern Manchester. I was always looking for clues, for a key to pick up, to open and go through the next door as a musician and a thinker and I probably still am, that’s the best way I can describe it. ‘Autonomy’ was like a key, it was ‘This riff is very, very deliberate, it’s not bluesy, it’s very bold and it doesn’t sound anything like classic rock.’ It’s really in your face, the words are very clever and sang in quite an effeminate, challenging vocal. I love The Clash but to me it was better than ‘White Riot’, it was this cross between aggression and arty. “The punks I’d see around Manchester personified that, they looked like little thugs and they were very effeminate, so again it’s that thing about the feminisation of rock music. I hadn’t realised that actually, but almost everything I’ve mentioned has got a non-testosterone aspect to it. That was quite a moment and being that age, fourteen, fifteen, you’re so fearless and open to being free, well I was anyway, I was looking for things to give me juice to fire that fearlessness up. I think you see through bullshit really well when you’re that age, when you get older you think too much!"