"I love Banana to bits, but the third one is my favourite, it’s the one that I play more. I don’t know exactly what it is about it. I bought their albums in order, but there was something about ‘Candy Says’ and ‘Jesus’ – maybe because I’d just got the White Light/White Heat album I wanted proper songs, and he delivered big time on this one. Even ‘Murder Mystery’ I like. I’m not the biggest John Cale fan, his voice gets on my wick. It was just at the time that Ziggy ended, it almost broke my heart. I had these magical split-second things – it was like being in love, but with someone from Venus, and then Lou came along and I knew he would get me through it."

"I had the great privilege of working on the sets of Fellini’s Satyricon and Roma. Fellini is for me one of the greatest of all filmmakers—he embraced life with his unique vision and genius. La strada, made in 1954, is the poetic and very moving story of a poor young woman who becomes a clown in a tiny, two-person circus. Her name is Gelsomina. A brutish gypsy, Zampanò, buys Gelsomina from her mother and takes her on the road with him. He trains her to be a clown. She falls in love with him even though he is abusive and cruel. What transpires is a tragic love story with the background of a magical traveling circus. This film surely influenced my interest in and love of the circus."

"Second film: All That Jazz, Bob Fosse. It’s an incredibly hopeful, uplifting art journey and you know, on the one hand it’s about a man who is killing himself through over-work and who is over-extended and miserable and is going to die of a heart attack, and on the other hand, it’s Bob Fosse’s celebration of the fact that he didn’t die of a heart attack. He came through, and now he’s going to take the events that precipitated him into his heart attack, create a roman à clef around them, and build something magical, which he does. There’s a sort of strange and lovely honesty to it that, the first time I saw it when I was about 15/16 and it was on television, I found arresting, and it’s magic."