"I was at NYU film school when I first saw If…. The second time was the very next day, when I brought friends and classmates to share this extraordinary movie experience. I have always harbored fantasies of blowing up my high school, but until If…. I never realized that I was not the only one. Obviously If…. was a huge influence on Rock ’n’ Roll High School. In the mid-1980s, I wrote an article about high school movies for American Film magazine in which I opined that If…. was the greatest of them all. A month later, I received a lovely letter from Lindsay Anderson, my hero (I also love O Lucky Man!). We corresponded for several years, finally meeting at the Telluride Film Festival. He called me “a movie brat typical of my generation” for preferring The Searchers to She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. (I treasure his criticism.) Wrapped in a scarf, Malcolm McDowell is as riveting and charismatic as ever in his screen debut. I showed the movie to my teenage daughters, who only know Malcolm as Linderman on Heroes, and it impressed a whole new generation of rebellious teens. If….’s DVD extras, especially “O Lucky Malcolm,” really capture the spirit of the man and the movie."

"I was going to go for ‘Call On Me’ from Safe As Milk but it has to be ‘Sure 'Nuff 'n Yes I Do’, which is probably my favourite ever Beefheart song. If I do any DJ’ing or I’m doing a party I open the set with this song. There’s just something about it, the groove on it was something I found really inspiring, again I guess it’s rooted in Rock and Roll, but it’s the way the beat is performed where it really helps the song to motor along. “I first heard this song way back. We used to listen to Frank Zappa a lot and Hot Rats was my favourite record for a while. I know Zappa divides a lot of people, but I think sometimes it’s misunderstood. People see it as this really annoying, muso stuff, which I definitely think it was later on at times, but I’ve always been intrigued by the rawness of early Zappa, how he used Beefheart and how he collaborated with him was always really interesting. I always look at it as really raw, they were all really good at their instruments and really good players but not musos at all. I thought it was raw, exciting and on the edge, but then the late ‘70s came along!” “What I love about Captain Beefheart and this track is the off-kilter rhythms, the instrumentation, the surreal, strange lyrics and the directness of it with its economic structures. This track is insane and sometimes he gets really abstract, which is cool in a different way, it’s kind of like all of it to be honest for different reasons, but ‘Sure 'Nuff 'n Yes I Do’ is like a party track, it’s just dirty and wonderful."