"He started so much. One of the many things I love about Bo Diddley, besides the fact that he created his own instruments with his own effects in them and was one of the first rock & rollers to have women in his band and wore glasses, is that he was a complete original. He's playing blues but it also feels like pop songs to me. Maybe I'm using that term a bit loose but a song like 'I'm a Man' or 'Before You Accuse Me', there's something to them. I feel like it's almost slighting them to call them pop but they're put together in a way that it's not Robert Johnson. There's something new that he's doing here. The fact that he had those shakers and it was such a big part of his sound. We've used that shaker sound and have tried to duplicate it many, many times. You use a little bit of room and you distort it a little bit and that's the Bo Diddley shaker sound. He took a form and made it something else."

"This wasn’t my introduction to folk music by any means, but it was my introduction to Irish folk music that wasn’t merely The Dubliners or The Chieftains. It was Irish music that had a bit of balls and a bit of a wayward quality that came I think from those guys knowing about rock music and, generally speaking, what was going on in the UK. You could call them the first progressive folk band. They had a good way of bringing together bits of tradition, mostly Irish traditional music, with an awareness in terms of arrangements that could only come from a knowledge of other musical forms. And of course they feature what was a growing, new instrument, a non-indigenous instrument of Irish music: the bouzouki. Not the bowl-shaped Greek bouzouki but the flat-backed bouzouki that was being made by luthiers in Britain and Ireland as a more convenient, big boy’s mandolin. The bouzouki became an important part of Irish folk music and Planxty used it to great effect."

"I can’t remember how I discovered this. I can’t remember where I heard it, or the shop I bought it from. In those days you bought records because you thought the cover was cool, and hoped that the music matched the sleeve. Even to this day it sounds like it could have been made last week. Ted Templeman did amazing job — it’s the reason Van Halen got him. Ronnie Montrose was an incredible guitar player, and Sammy Hagar — even to this day — is a stunning vocalist. And the thought that Ronnie Montrose and Bill Church (the bass player) actually played with Van Morrison [on Tupelo Honey and Saint Dominic’s Preview] beggars belief. Denny Carmassi’s drumming was right up there with Bonham. The negativity around the band was probably the only thing that stopped them from going places, and because people thought they were poor man’s Zeppelin. The album was very reminiscent of Zeppelin, but its production was bigger. It’s just a really good slice of American rock, but it sounds very British."

"Another one of my five favorite films would be Gimme Shelter, by the Maysles brothers. I spent many years making documentary films between my first film and my second film, Blue Valentine, and I learned to really embrace, and be humbled by life, and by telling a story where you’re telling someone else’s story. And there’s something about the Maysles brothers, and especially that movie, where they were able to witness these moments. Especially with Gimme Shelter, you know, these moments of American history — this concert at Altamont that turned into kind of the bad trip of Woodstock. And I love how they frame it with the band, the Stones, watching the footage, watching their memories; this document, this witness to this incredible time in American life — and this crime, this real crime in America. Also, for nothing else than the moment where Mick Jagger has to watch Tina Turner. Again, like watching the Scorsese movie — and the Pasolini movie — their use of music, you know, is to watch a real rock and roll movie in the theater, with that sound. It’s great."

"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."

"Gorky's were one of the greats. Whoever the greats of the rock canon are – and it's no use me bothering to name various people – Gorky's are as important as any of these people. Euros Childs is a phenomenal songwriter, has a pitch perfect voice and this record is their classic line-up with John Lawrence still in the band. This is also produced by Gorwel Owen and he was perfecting his vision in a way as he was getting more and more into simplicity; the song Heywood Lane was recorded with just one microphone and they bypassed the mixing desk and went straight to tape! It's a really great sounding record. It was really bizarre that the singles all charted in the low-40s without ever breaking the Top 40. You could release two versions of a single at the time to get it into the charts but they never did that even though they probably sold as much as chart-claiming people! But the records are there. It's aged incredibly well and still sounds really fresh and complete."