"I think everyone has a complicated relationship with Michael Jackson, but if you listen back to his stuff it’s insanely unique. Nothing sounds like it, people might have a similar voice, but in terms of the kind of music, it’s very particular. It’s the first record I remember singing along with. I remember having a seven inch of ‘Another Part Of Me’ which had an instrumental on the other side and I realised it was just a karaoke opportunity. It was a huge pop record from when I was young, and very influential in a way; the same way that The Beatles teach you about music, Michael Jackson was like the first pop person I was aware of, and Kylie Minogue in our house was the female equivalent. An insanely successful guy who isn’t a macho guy, but is captivating in some way. Then you’ve got the ‘pinnacle’ of Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson together!"

"One more. I’d have to say Red River. Great Western. John Wayne, Monty Clift — Monty Clift couldn’t be more wrong for a Western, and yet it totally works. When they finally have their fist fight at the end, they’ve taken and shot Wayne to even out the fight, because Wayne was about six inches taller than Clift, and 80 pounds heavier, and the fight works fine. The spirit of the cattle drive is extraordinary, the amount of drama that happens; the father and son struggle — in essence the Oedipal struggle, even though he’s not actually his son — between Clift and John Wayne, is magnificent. It’s pure Hawks: Men on the trail doing something dangerous, and doing it well. You can’t ask for a better Western. It talks about the whole opening of Texas, and it talks about the relationship between men. It talks about the dynamics of leadership, talks about betrayal. It’s Shakespearian, really, without any pretention. Pure Hawks."

"This wild ride was released in 1959. John Cage reads 90 one-minute texts, while David Tudor creates inventive cacophony in another room, out of hearing; so that any relation between voice and accompaniment is purely accidental, as Cage says in the liner notes, "to suggest that all things – stories, incidental sounds from the environment, and by extension, beings – are related, and that this complexity is more evident when it is not oversimplified by an idea of relationship in one person's mind." Cage's preoccupations include music, mushrooms, and Merce Cunningham; personal anecdotes, Zen proverbs and monk jokes, and lots of modernist name dropping. Tudor's palette includes prepared piano, springs, radios, and existing music, notably Cage's 1958 Fontana Mix. Cage complains that at his readings inevitably "someone comes up afterwards and insists that the continuity was a planned one, in spite of the ideas that are expressed regarding purposelessness, emptiness, chaos, etc." Planned, schmanned! "