"I was living in Cornwall just after art college and lots of mates back home in Cardiff were really getting into kosmische stuff. One mate sent me a tape of this album. Amon Düül were a radical commune band, something which seemed a pretty out-there idea when you're living in Falmouth. I love this album, it's so varied. It's got pastoral music and very hard psych stuff on there side by side. I heard this record before hearing bands like NEU! and Cluster; it helped me get into the fact that the German bands of that post-war era had a year zero which was very appealing – by disregarding American rock & roll they created these amazing new templates. As with so many of these records, I'm drawn in by the artwork. The sleeve for Wolf City is amazing. I found out years later from Andy Votel that they created the sleeve by taking a photograph of an image created by several slide projectors overlapping onto a wall. You'd spend ages trying to get that right in Photoshop."

"I don't like all of the record, but I forgive the bits of it that are drenched in too much Marty Ballin, because other than that there's 'White Rabbit', 'Somebody to Love'... There's that crazy reverbed out acoustic piece, 'Embryonic Journey', that I've been playing at parties at my house and no one knows what it is. It's otherwordly. And I like that era of radical San Francisco glamour, there's an element of that in Big Brother and the Holding Company too. There's something about the way the guitars and drums were compressed together that I like. I like that era of Grace Slick, she's at the peak of discovering her dynamics and her voice. Even lyrically, she comes out with some cool shit, she's so confident and so free that we get those great, simple songs. When she gets to that very last "feed your head", it's just a perfect moment. They build to that and it's completely perfect. You couldn't write it that way, you couldn't think to do it, you just have to do it and hope you don't fuck it up."

"Déclassé doubles being kinda a Ripley thing, The American Friend has a trashy yet seductive sister called Ripley’s Game, which, if you haven’t seen it, has John Malkovich and a very GoldenEye vibe. I watch both on regular rotation. But it’s really so wild that The American Friend is the older film, because where Ripley’s Game is like a classic Hollywood cash-in, The American Friend is a radical reinterpretation of the material. It says all the loud parts quiet in a way that deepens the pathos and significance of the Ripley cycle. Rather than being a social-climbing dandy, Dennis Hopper’s Ripley is a mumbling cowboy hipster—it’s maybe his most likable role. And Bruno Ganz’s Jonathan, who can so easily just be a pathetic sucker, is instead an existential hero. But for all its understatement and the arty languid pacing, when the film needs to be—as in the train scene—it’s as taut and calculated as Hitchcock. Oh man, and that stuff about the Beatles and Hamburg is so damn smart. It’s crazy that a director whose work is all over the place could produce a film so totally organic and emotionally satisfying. Honestly it’s not fair."

"I emigrated to Canada with my mother the year Mon oncle Antoine debuted, the same time that the U.S. was doing nuclear testing on Amchitka Island, off the coast of British Columbia. The FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) was flourishing. Canadian radio was given a mandate to stop playing American bubblegum round the clock. In this era of radical identity building, along came a candle-lit holiday fable set in an undertaker’s home in rural Quebec. The nephew of Antoine is a young boy coming of age in a world that no one outside his cloistered family could imagine. Mon oncle Antoine is about the sexual, material, and death’s-end taboos in a small village—and the taboo against anyone outside of it ever learning of such things. Some people puzzle over why this film keeps being called Canada’s finest decades after its release, when so many other artists have surpassed its modest ambitions. It is because of this: It was the beginning of saying, “We are not the back forty of the U.S.; we are not a trinket of the queen’s; our land and generations have given us a purchase of our own.” It was the beginning of remarkable Canadian filmmaking."