"I saw Tinariwen by accident at the Cambridge Folk Festival some time in my early 20s. I had a massive hangover, so went to sit in the artists' bit at Cambridge, this bit on the side of the stage where you can see the bands play. I wasn't really paying attention to start with – it was a bad hangover– but slowly but surely this amazing this happened. I was draw in, then hooked in, then totally hypnotised by this music that crashed over me in my little fog. The music had so much forward momentum, and the guitars had so much space, it was like I was being taken off somewhere. It was the most transcendental experience. I love the textural stuff on this record especially – the different types of percussion, the clapping, the chorus singing. The whole thing ebbs and flows. 

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"As much as I love this film and have seen it hundreds of times, I feel like I never TRULY saw it before looking at this remastered DVD! Such beautiful black and white! Every character in this film is a feast for an actor to play . . . even the maid (Jean Dixon) is rich with her own cynicism and longings. The chemistry between William Powell and Carole Lombard is something seldom glimpsed these days. And yet their romance had long before this film bloomed, gone to marriage and divorce. But the couple remained the closest of friends and the warm feeling between them is brimming in every single frame of the film. The DVD also includes the Lux Radio Theater broadcast, and there are some really fun outtake bloopers with Eugene Pallette—LOVE HIM—and Powell and Lombard."

"I will give you Unfinished Piece for the Player Piano. Oh, it’s a great movie. It’s a Russian movie; [Nikita] Mikhalkov is the director, and it’s a Checkhov play, really — it’s based on Platonov. Chekhov is unbelievably difficult to do, to capture the mood, to capture the humor, the incredible sadness and pathos of the characters, all that. It’s very rare that you see a great production of Checkhov. I saw this when I was rehearsing a production of The Cherry Orchard. The great British director Peter Brook was directing, and he set up a screening of this movie for us. It’s just, it’s also a beautiful movie to look at, and also it was a great director, but it’s the characters, both the acting and the depiction of this wonderful, very specific group of Russian characters is unmatched."

"I saw an advert for this album when it came out and I had to buy it. I just thought, 'With a title like that, it’s either going to be the greatest thing ever or the worst thing ever.' And from the second I put it on and heard 'Barabajagal (Love Is Hot)' by Donovan that blew me away. The second the album finished I got on the phone, and I was like, 'Find me these guys. I need to go and work with them.' Then I found out more about them and I went onto their website and they’ve got podcasts and everything. You should see them DJing. They are unbelievable. They will blow your mind. They’re modern day geniuses… even though one of them never says a word and the other one never stops talking."