"Kurt Cobain talked about punk a lot even though everyone spoke about Nirvana being a grunge band, which I found quite confusing at the time. So I asked a friend of mine’s uncle about what punk was and I went out and got the first Clash record and the Sex Pistols. I was kind of into that, and then the '90s American skate punk thing arrived in my life. It’s a complex record, but it’s a really fun, poppy record at the same time Green Day and The Offspring were the gateway bands and I got heavily into NOFX, Pennywise and all that stuff, but the record that really sticks with me is Everything Sucks. It’s fast, it’s hard, it’s heavy but it’s also melodic as well. It’s a complex record, but it’s a really fun, poppy record at the same time. I listened to it yesterday. It’s a masterpiece of punk rock. It was my gateway into underground punk rock"

"PlayTime is an incredible film. I just love the idea of staging scenes that look familiar but don’t function as the scenes we imagined them to be. And I like that he was fascinated with the mundane. So there’s an airport setting and there are people wearing uniforms and people that look like passengers waiting, and there are scenes occurring, but it’s just the form of a scene that you have seen in some way many times. The way he mixed sounds, where the background noise was louder than the dialogue—having that buried in the background when people spoke is just really brilliant filmmaking. I love the recontextualization. And it’s a masterpiece, with long, huge, choreographed shots of all these entrances and exits and things happening in the background and foreground. So where you’re placing your attention has been subverted so you don’t quite know what you’re looking at or what to look at. And that is incredibly impressive and very inspirational."

"I came across this early on in my operatic journey, and to this day it remains one of my favourite recordings and one of my favourite operas. The wonderful thing about Verdi is that, as you get older, it starts to make more and more sense: these fraught relationships between fathers and sons and lovers and friends. He's so profound in his understanding of human relationships. This opera, Don Carlos, is in my opinion a great masterpiece on a Shakespearian level in its defining, most notably, of the father and son dynamic. There's actually a moment when the father contemplates killing his son – I don't know, but I think that has crossed the minds of certain dads. And as well as Domingo and Caballé, Shirley Verrett is on that recording, who is one of the greatest mezzo-sopranos of all time. So everybody is in there at their zenith vocally, and it's a wild ride."