"Is it cheating? [Laughs] It’s hard to pick. I wouldn’t necessarily know which. I mean, I love the Goblet of Fire. I don’t know. Maybe the Goblet of Fire. I read those books so quickly when I was a kid, because that whole world was so, like… it took me out of my reality. And I just love magic and I loved that whole world, the creatures, and just how you felt so friendly with all the characters. The way they translated that into movies, I thought was genius. You know when they take a book, and they make it a movie, and you hope that it’s gonna be everything that you hope for and more? To me they just succeeded. I don’t know, I just love them so much. Every time I’m sick I’ll watch a marathon of them and I can repeat all the words."

"This was very, very hard to put together and I’ve left out so many great songs. I could do a list of 150 songs at least, but ‘La Femme D’argent’ really leapt out. It’s the most electronic of the songs that I’ve selected. To this day, every time I listen to Air, it makes me fall in love with electronic music but in a way that reminds me that you can marry electronic music and, let’s say, traditional instruments, especially the bass guitar. Air are absolute geniuses with basslines, they have a great tone and it’s such a good homage to Serge Gainsbourg and stuff like that. Their sense of melody and structure and building up a song is quite something. They make the best background music that you want to play louder than the conversation that you’re having. I love it for driving, if I don’t know what to listen to, I’ll probably stick on Moon Safari or Premiers Symptômes, which is an EP that’s not talked about that much. So many of their tracks - ‘La Femme D’argent’ being a strong example - are really inspiring from a production point of view. It’s all about the little world that these tracks live in, where it couldn’t be anyone but Air. Bands like Zero 7 have copied Air, but it’s just not as good. You know something has a really unique quality when if you were to try to write a song in that style, people would know straight away; it would be like, ‘Oh, that sounds like Air.’ I think there’s other bands that manage it, take The Strokes when they did Is This It - you can sound like Is This It, there’s a world that that record is in. I could literally go downstairs right now and make a song that’s like Air and people would definitely say it sounds like Air, but if I recorded a song in the style of a band that doesn’t really have a unique quality in terms of recording or production, people would say, ‘Oh, it just sounds like an indie band.’ I never go out and want to copy anything. Rather than listen to it, I basically fast on music when I’m writing and recording, because I’m afraid of subconsciously taking inspiration from somebody else. I mean, you do that any way - you can’t help it - but when I’m asked, ‘What music were you listening to when making this album?’ I tend to reply, ‘No one, really.’ Again, you can’t not listen to music as it’s everywhere, but it’s different in terms of immersing oneself. Like when I got into Scott Walker, I would just listen to his albums, Scott 1, 2, 3 and 4 all the time, but I don’t think you should do that when you’re recording your own music. A while back, I was listening to a song off the most recent Arctic Monkeys record, ‘Four Out of Five’ and it occurred to me that they obviously had been listening to Lou Reed, because there’s that one melody that sounds exactly like ‘Satellite of Love.’ The bit that goes, “Take it easy for a little while…” that’s very obviously “Satellite of Love”. It’s like, come on. They are very open about what they listen to, but that’s just lifted. I think it’s their best record, but in terms of that particular lift they were either aware of it or they were listening to Lou Reed on the tour bus or obsessed with the Bowie/Lou Reed partnership or something. Generally, I do worry about that, because people compare our songs to things. The worst is when people say ‘Shelter Song’ is just ‘Ticket to Ride’, it’s nothing like ‘Ticket To Ride', it’s got a twelve-string guitar on it, that’s like saying any guitar song sounds like Robert Johnson or the Edge or someone!"

"Number four would be Dazed and Confused. That was the movie that you saw and you wished it were your life. [laughs] That was a movie that I would watch all the time. I had it on VHS and whenever I was lonely, I’d throw it on. Whenever I wished I was out and about with friends from school, I would just throw that on and felt like I knew [the characters]. That was just one of those films that I just related to at that time. It was incredibly important and it’s another quotable film. I love it."