"I'd heard of Andy Warhol, but I'd never heard The Velvet Underground until David Bowie talked about them in interviews in the NME, and of course Transformer. I'd rather talk about Transformer than the banana album actually, because Transformer sums up the era. I do believe that Mick Ronson was very instrumental - like a classically trained musician as well as a gorgeous rock god lead guitarist. His arrangement abilities for both Ziggy Stardust and Transformer have not been fully recognised in the history of pop music. I don't think David would've broke through without that. I remember dancing to 'Vicious' in a nightclub called Masquerade in Liverpool - a really eccentric gay bar full of diesel dykes, prostitutes and older gay men with dyed black hair and toupees. It was a strange netherworld hidden up a back alley that embraced a bunch of freaks of my generation like Pete Burns and me, Jane Casey, who wore too much make-up. That was the thing about a gay club, you were safe almost in there. A strange refuge. I suppose in a way, punk kind of helped that. Absolutely. One minute you were queer on the street, the next minute you were a punk. It normalised that sort of behaviour really, you know; ""Oh, they're just punks"", and it was a diversion away from sexuality. Punk was strangely non-sexual. Even the main protagonist John Lydon had something of a 'neither here nor there' about him."

"And the rest of the films in John Cassavetes: Five Films. Not one film but five, which already takes me over my Ten Best quota. Pick any of these films and meditate on performance, what makes it and what sustains it. If there is a choice to make I would opt for Faces and for The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Godard, who admired the latter, compared it to listening to a piano player tickling a few last chords on the ivories in the wee hours of the morning, when the last patrons have left the nightclub and the waiters are stacking the chairs on the tables . . . Not a bad comparison, all in all). Looking at a Cassavetes movie should persuade any viewer that there are no bad actors but only bad directors, and that acting has more to do with the strategic setting of gestures in space than it has to do with a trip to the flea market of emotions. The miracle of Cassavetes’s craft lies in that he makes the emotion surge, while obstinately refusing to illustrate it. No wonder his actors look always as if they were documented. Look at the bodies of Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassel, and Peter Falk: they are all avatars of Lillian Gish, the rightful inheritors of that magic moment in Broken Blossoms when with her fingers she creased a smile on her terrified face and invented film acting."