"This was from college and Charles had it, and obviously I knew those songs. Jimmy Page and [John] Bonham and John Paul Jones did the arrangements to this song, 'Hurdy Gurdy Man'. Fucking hell man! That's epic! Also, I like the sensibility of basically saying "fuck you", well, not fuck you, but it was the freedom of the 70s - I know 'I Love My Shirt' isn't on that album but I just love that, it was like, "Wow, what kind of freedom can you get talking about your favourite goddamn shirt!" And washing it in the stream! And he'll say, "Know what I mean?" [laughs] There's a song there, 'Sunshine Superman', and I played it for Charles and he went, "Shit!" It's so strange. It took me a while, it's got - [imitates guitar] - it's got all these weird sonic spots, it's more sonic really than the melody, because the melody there, what is that?"

"Romeo and Juliet is on my list because I saw it when I was at a very formative age. I think I was 14 or 15, and at that age, girls are very dramatic about romance and they’re just starting to get those feelings, and love is very painful and very important. It’s overwhelming and you have these huge crushes, and so Romeo and Juliet is all about that huge first love. And you couldn’t have found two more beautiful teenagers than Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting… and that was the first time I had ever seen Michael York and he was stunning — he was stunning. The costumes were gorgeous. Zeffirelli was a beautiful artist. He designed theater and opera and sets, so it was just beautiful. I think why I love Italy so much now is because of that movie, and it made me fall in love with Shakespeare. That’s one of the first times that Shakespeare became not just some dusty old English thing that you had to study in school, but it became really alive. You know what else did that really well? Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet… So, Romeo and Juliet was my first introduction. I walked around pretending I was Olivia Hussey. I had my long dark hair parted in the middle, and we had these, like, hippie baby-doll blouses that had the empire waist, so I would wear that all the time and I’d sorta stare at myself in the mirror. Of course, there was nobody in Cleveland, OH who looked anything like Leonard Whiting, so it was all in my head."

"I usually have Reservoir Dogs and Rocky Horror Picture Show on my list, because I just love them so much. I did Kids, and the first film I really can remember watching specifically to look at acting after that was Reservoir Dogs. My dad had given me the VHS tape of it to watch over and over and over again. Well, he didn’t intend for me, I think, to watch it over and over and over again, but I watched it over and over again; I think I watched it like five or six times that week. I would come home from school and I would just watch it again, and memorize the whole thing, and I was just so blown away by the acting in it. It seemed like it must have had all this money, because you remember it being bloody, you remember the shock, all that kinda stuff. And then you watch it and you’re like, “Actually, [Quentin Tarantino] cut around all of that.” The dude with red stuff on his chest, you know what I mean? It’s all acting. And it’s such an interesting way of telling the story, going back and inside of itself. My dad, I’ll never forget, he was like, “Watch this for the acting,” and I was just blown away. So I feel like that’s a piece of work that I love looking at as sort of a modern way of getting into those huge monologues, telling stories in an epic way, and the sort of more modern kind of small stories."

"Me and James were obsessed with the NME ‘100 Best Albums Of All Time’ in the mid 80s, so we started buying as many as we could - Marquee Moon, Blonde On Blonde, The Clash... some of them we had anyway, but then there were things like Pet Sounds, which was really high, and when you’re 14 you think of the Beach Boys as fucking idiots going “doo wop”, don’t you? We both got What’s Going On and I think it’s the first time I realised, in an exotic way, that politics could translate. Through colour, through country - you could still feel the desperation of someone else even though it was your first exposure to music like that. Obviously my Mum and Dad had tons of records, but the intimacy of playing that in your bedroom and being transported to another world of the same anger you were feeling, but then in such a graceful way. ‘Inner City Blues’, the title track, ‘Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)’. There’s lot’s of brackets - lot’s of songs with brackets. I love that idea of brackets. I love the cover. You can still put it on today, and obviously in the studio we have lots of vinyl and a record player - you put that one in particular and it drifts, it seduces you but it also stimulates."

"""This one is like the mystery house on Escape to the Country, it’s a curveball. The point I wanted to make with ‘2-4-6-8 Motorway’ is that it’s not one of my favourite songs, the point is it’s always been there but I only really discovered it and fell in love with it in the last couple of weeks. That’s one of the most exciting and inspiring things about making music, discovering songs that have existed your whole life, even though you may have only been semi-aware of them. “I’ve always found it much easier to place my faith in songs that have existed my whole life than a new band or a new artist, you know what they are, you know they’re not going to let you down, they’re not going to do anything sexist or say anything racist or make a terrible second EP. “It’s also so exciting discovering things, I love all those reissue labels like Light in the Attic and finding these treasure troves of records and artists that have been there your whole life, like ‘How has this existed my entire time on earth and I’ve never stumbled upon it?’ ‘2-4-6-8 Motorway’ is a stone cold classic, it’s very British, it’s a big song."""