"I remember going in, this was back when they had VHS, and you go to the movie rental place, and that was probably the last time I saw it, and ET was playing on the TV. I had to finish it there. ET came out and it would stay in the theater for, like nine months. Remember those days, you pay like two dollars, God I’m dating myself, but pay two bucks for an afternoon movie, and go see ET, and it would be there for, like, nine months. I saw it, probably 10, 15 times in the theater. Let alone the rentals afterwards. It’s just one of those things that encapsulates a time period in my childhood, when I had a lot of freedom on my bike and was allowed to go to the theater. It certainly is a throwback to a really good time in my life. Being a young man, coming of age. And, come on, it’s a classic Spielberg movie. It’s beautiful and the music, it’s great. Fantastic."

"In Talking Heads, the record collection was filled with Hamilton Bohannon, James Brown, Roxy Music, Funkadelic, and P-Funk, that whole world. George Clinton and his whole crazy P-Funk philosophy was great; they were doing these kind of spectacles. As we kept making records, they evolved into more rhythmic affairs, kind of weird, white-person funk. We decided that in order to represent this music live onstage, we needed to recruit some real funkers into the band. The size of the band pretty much doubled. It was a big, nervy thing to do, and it was a mess at first. But man, was it fun. In this period, I decided to formalize the tour into a show that became Stop Making Sense. And that was about as far as we could go with that idea. It liberated me musically, but also as a person. The music was a lot more ecstatic, almost trance-y; you could get lost in it, way more than you could when it’s just a four piece."

"My late friend and mentor, a guy called Roger Eagle, who used to run Eric's [club] in Liverpool, he turned me on to Bobby Bland. And straight away I was just blown away by the voice. This incredible voice. What I like about Bobby Bland is he has tinges of jazz in the R&B, it's not just straight ahead R&B, the jazz comes through. I was very fortunate to spend time with Bobby, and B.B. King as well, they were very close friends [of one another]. B.B. contributes to the film we made when we went over to Memphis and I spent a little time with Bobby [this documentary features on the DVD edition of M.H.'s 2008 solo album, Tribute to Bobby]. He's a profound influence on me, he's a truly great singer. His music lives with me, and I just love him and it. I love the R&B of that period. A wonderful experience, just knowing these guys, and spending time with them and listening to their stories."

"Being from the South and being from that whole No Limit/Cash Money movement you’re a Wayne fan. You give him his props just for being associated with the Hot Boyz. It was at a period when I had just gotten to college. ""I had a suitemate that ended up being one of my good friends in life, and he was putting me onto these Lil Wayne Squad Up mixtapes. I started really noticing his lyrical ability. I noticed that something had changed between his younger Hot Boyz days and then. ""After that, we got out and went home for the summer. He was like, ‘Did you hear this Lil Wayne Tha Carter?’ and he sent me his album. I’ll never forget hearing that intro thinking, ‘This shit is crazy.’ That album and his first Dedication mixtape was what got me sold on him to the point where I was going out and praising Lil Wayne, like, ‘This nigga is the best.’ This album represents that time when he started to hit that monster level."

"""When I started Sleaford Mods I started to explore my childhood influences, like The Meteors. I was 13 in 1983, but it was a good period of music. Socially it was not very good, but creatively it was great. I tried to dress up, I was a bit of a scooter boy. Pilot jacket, American lightweight camouflage trousers, leather jacket, crows nest haircut that didn't look very good, but you know, that kind of thing. It made a big impression on me, but I didn't experiment with these ideas until Sleaford Mods really, when I found my natural voice. I can sing, but singing is a really difficult thing. I can sing very well and I did that for so many years but it's not my real voice. When I started Sleaford it was my own voice and I married perfectly to that kind of thing. People these days are like, ""Oh you sound like John Lydon,"" well, I don't mean to sound like John Lydon, if there's echoes of that, it's just the way I speak, you know."""

"The years right after the war were a very special time in cinema, all around the world. Millions were slaughtered, entire cities were leveled, humanity’s faith in itself was shaken. The greatest filmmakers were moved to create meditations on existence, on the miracle of life itself. They didn’t look away from harshness and violence—quite the contrary. Rather, they dealt with them directly and then looked beyond, from a greater and more benign distance. I’m thinking of Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis and Europa ’51, the great neorealist films by Visconti and De Sica, Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff, Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Seven Samurai, Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, Ford’s My Darling Clementine and Wagon Master, and this remarkable picture. This was Jean Renoir’s first picture after his American period, his first in color, and he used Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel to create a film that is, really, about life, a film without a real story that is all about the rhythm of existence, the cycles of birth and death and regeneration, and the transitory beauty of the world."