"Another imperfect perfect film that came slithering into my late-adolescent consciousness at just the right time. I was a disciple by the end of the opening titles (alone worth the price of admission). This thing is a bath of Cronenberg’s cold, polite, Torontonian style, and thus makes the story’s insanity that much more insane—the form of the movie pressure-cooking the content. And what better way to dramatically illustrate this repression explosion than a scene wherein Dr. Icy Veins himself, Jeremy Irons, pounces across an operating table in a spasm of drug withdrawal, belly flopping onto his unconscious patient to rip off her mask and suck anesthetic gas. This is a film featuring twin prescription-drug-addicted gynecologists dressed like Star Wars Imperial Guards who use H. R. Giger–esque, Josef Mengele–level–scary surgical instruments to operate on the “abnormal genitalia” of women they mistake for mutants. Now, if that’s not one for the whole family, well, I don’t know what is! (See Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts for obvious inspiration.)"

"My mate used to work at WH Smith’s record department, and the salesman from Polydor had been in and said “’Ere, we’ve got this record. It’s a bit weird, lad, but everyone seems to like it…” So he bought the lot, 50 copies. And it’s that old cliché: it sounded like it came from outer space. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before. I wasn’t really mad on rock music as such, and I was young, so I heard it with my formative listening ears, and it struck me as something really exotic and other-worldly. You listen to those songs: no choruses, solos that go on for hours, and… not that I’d compare us to Roxy Music in the slightest, but when we were writing some of those early songs like ‘Night Boat To Cairo’ and ‘Embarrassment’, they were songs that had no chorus, and verses and solos that went all over the place, and didn’t have a verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure, and I’m sure that in some very small way was informed by Roxy Music. Even down to the fact that they don’t mention ‘Virginia Plain’ until the very end, which is what we did with ‘Embarrassment’! “You’re an embarrassment…“, the last word of the song. I never saw them live, but I do clearly remember seeing them on The Old Grey Whistle Test, and old Whispering Bob (Harris) saying ‘If that’s the future of rock & roll, then I’m fucking off!’ And fortunately, it was. And the whole glamour of that album sleeve, and the portraits of the five of them inside the gatefold, and the clothes they were wearing… Andy Mackay had these sunburst crepe-heeled Toppers, I think they were called, that I spent months trying to find, and they were fifty quid even then. And you’d nick the poster off the Tube, but you’d have to rip off eight posters in one go, so you ended up with this completely rock-hard Roxy Music poster that you couldn’t roll up under your arm, and you’d try and pin it to your wall but it would keep coming off. All that formative stuff’s so important…"