"""The first one would be Lindsay Anderson’s If… It’s a film that I love because it allows me sometimes try and explain what it was like to be a kid at an English Public School — I was a scholarship boy in the early 1970s — late ’60s where you were in — even though it’s set earlier than that and was made earlier than that — you were in a culture that hasn’t changed. I remember just watching it and suddenly feeling understood. Which was a completely new one for me. I’d be, you know, This is my world. It was like, OK, here is something Malcolm McDowell–starring, the idea of kids — while we didn’t actually shoot up the school in rebellion, it was the kind of strange stuffy environment that needed to come tumbling down, and I’d never seen that before depicted on film. For years I wondered about why some sequences were in black and white, and many years later I was reading an interview with Lindsey Anderson and discovered it was because they ran out of money for color film, so they just went over to black and white stock, which works in several places through the story."""

"I’m really worried about these five films. It’s such a tough question. I mean, the first one is easy for me, I can do that right off the bat. The first one’s Back to the Future, for so many reasons: sentimental, cinematic; in terms of just a movie that you love, measuring a movie in terms of how often you can see it without getting tired of it — it’s all of those things for me. I think it’s the most perfect movie ever made. It’s like the form of a movie that all other movies, entertainment-wise, should aspire to. It’s something that I’ll always study — just the storytelling, the efficiency of it. The fact that every element works so perfectly in harmony. It’s a thing to behold."

"I like them, because they were just that. Dres [Andre Dres Titus] is actually a friend of mine. I'll call him, I want you to tell him what we're doing... [He makes a call on his phone, but there's no answer]. Anyway, I was a wolf in sheep's clothing; I could just relate to that. They looked so unassuming, but they were the first to represent that you could talk about bitches and ho's - stuff that the other groups didn't. And Dres is one of the most underrated MC's ever. He's great, he can really rap man. For that to be their debut album… I just loved 'Flavor Of The Month'. The album doesn't get the love it deserves at all. Hopefully people can go and check it out for themselves, because it's dope."

"Number three would be a Ken Loach film. I love Ken Loach very much because I love what he stands for politically. I love his bravery and I love the way that he really wanted to get these very socio-economic stories and real examinations of society in England and the unfairness of it. I think the way that he can manage to do that and make films that are entertaining as well, means that he’s such a master. He did a film in 1993 called Raining Stones. It’s one of my favorite Ken Loach films, and it’s one of my favorite films in general. It’s a heartbreaking story about an unemployed man who has to scrape together the money for his daughter’s first Communion dress, because in the society that they live in, that’s quite an important thing. You have to have a new dress for Communion. It’s about the dignity of trying to find the money and not letting her go to this event with a secondhand dress. It’s about how people who would seem to be on the fringes of society and treated with a lot of contempt by a lot of conventional media — it’s an examination of how they do have moral compasses. They are human beings, and they do abide by a set of rules, and they’re not scum. They just had a very unfortunate break. I think there’s something about that examination of that which is very deep psychological and socio-economic issues, but then in a very entertaining way. I think when you get a message combined with the entertainment value, I think that’s when you’re really on to something. Because if you have a story like that, which can be very depressing and very heartbreaking and very dour in other hands, if you can make that funny and actually make that interesting, you can put your message across all the more strongly. So I think that’s what I love about Ken Loach, the fact that he knows that in order to get people to listen to your message, you have to be able to entertain them. I think that’s a much harder thing to do than to just put a message across in a very prescribed way. He works hard to make things as entertaining as he possibly can, knowing that his message is gonna come across all the more effectively. I think he’s the king of the message."

"They famously reformed last year and I've seen them a couple of times and played on the same bill with them. One of my great regrets was that I came to this album a couple of years after it came out and my friends had all been to the show when they came through town and I missed it. It felt like a concert I should have been at. Part of it was that I hated guitar bands. In high school I was into terrible progressive rock like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes, while all my friends were into Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth. I always thought I was in the right and it was them who was barking up the wrong tree, which subsequently has made me a little bit embarrassed, because it was the 90s - I should've been listening to Sonic Youth. But I was firmly committed against guitar music and it was the same friends, like Ryan [Smith] - who's in my band now playing guitar and keyboards and other stuff, and who's been my friend since I was 11 or 12 - who was the guy in the Dinosaur Jr. T-shirt trying to get me to play organ chords in the background for his band, and I was grumbling away, ""When the fuck do I get my solo?"" And he introduced me to Neutral Milk Hotel. It's kind of an obvious way in for me, because it very much has that sound - the spiritual free jazz and the horns and the power and the instruments from around the world, different bagpipe kind of instruments - for me, it has that same spirit and wildness. It's also one of those albums, like the Pharoah Sanders, where the songs are all essentially the same song. And I don't mean that to diminish the achievement of this record because I think it's amazing, but when you have a record where you listen to the first song and the melody is so elemental to me - it's like it existed before this album was written - and then later on you hear another song and it's the same melody but inverted. Not in a technical sense, but you get the impression that these songs all come from the same tree and I love that. That's one of the things that the album format can do - tie things together like that. I've done that myself consciously on my records in the past - reprised a melody. On Our Love there are two songs that are essentially the same song revisited - 'All I Ever Need' and 'Your Love Will Set You Free'. Not the melody, but the underlying riff and the harmony."

"A little Whiplash anecdote is, of course, like everybody else, I had no idea who Damien Chazelle was. Jason Reitman was the one who sent me the script, in an email, for Whiplash. He sent me both the short and the feature script and just said, “Read this,” and obviously it’s from Jason so I’m gonna read it. It was again, obviously, probably one of the most brilliant scripts I had ever read and one of the best fits in terms of the character that I really immediately understood and felt like I could wrap my brain around and pull off. They said, “The writer-director would love to meet you,” and we set up a lunch, and Damien and I sat down and immediately basically agreed on everything, except he didn’t know that I had a musical background, so he was talking about how we’d have body doubles and we’d have somebody coaching me on how to wave my arms around like a conductor. And I said, “Hey, we don’t need that because actually, that’s one of the arrows I have in my quiver.” That was one of those moments where it felt like kismet, that Damien was like, “Oh, my God.” He said, “When Jason and Helen suggested you for this part, I immediately thought that’s a great idea, but I had no idea that you actually had those kinds of abilities.” And also, he didn’t write the script for me, but he wrote it with Miles Teller in mind from the beginning, and didn’t know that Miles had been playing drums since he was 15 years old."

"Well I was always a Sticky Fingers and Goat’s Head Soup guy. But I never really understood Exile…. Well it was more that everyone was going on about it and I didn’t understand why. And I just thought there were too many songs on it, and too many unfinished ideas. And you kept seeing all these editions of it. I hate it when you’ve got a band like the Rolling Stones who have millions of brilliant songs and loads of great albums and someone goes: “But THIS is the definitive, mega album.” I just don’t like being told that, so I was always quite resistant. But then last year I just said: “Enough is enough, I’m going to stop fighting it.” I read something amazing about that period of their touring and how mental it was, and I thought, “Fuck it, I’ll listen to it again.” And I listened to it, and haven’t stopped listening to it! I love it now. It’s got loads of brilliant songs on it, but they aren’t like mega hit songs, if you look through the list you don’t see what you would consider to be one of the all-time golden classic Rolling Stones songs. But when you listen to the album it just makes sense."