"This record is incredibly passionate, and it's got incredible lyrics. I've since become friends with Wes [Eisold, frontman] and he's a great guy, a great writer and musician, but this record just holds so much weight in my youth, at a time when I was quite lost and hardcore really picked me up. They were emerging at that time and they're from Boston, which just seemed violent to me, and I needed that violence in my life. I stage dove to American Nightmare in Camden Underworld in 2003 and dislocated my arm, and when I saw them play it was something hard to ignore. They looked like mods, like they should have lived in Brighton in the 70s. It was so weird to see a dude in skinny jeans, DMs, and a Fred Perry shirt but screaming his guts out in North London, surrounded by kids in black hoodies, it was bizarre. I still have it in my workout playlist now and that's a good 15 years on. When I hear the song 'AM/PM' it makes me want to stage dive again, and I love that it can make me feel like that so late in the day."

"In the same way as I chose Al Green I chose this because they are the first real electric blues band, they are just magnificent: the songs are great, the singing's great, the arrangement's are great, the sound is great - they invented it, pretty much. I got really familiar with this round about '83, '84. I was breaking up with someone and breaking up with myself really. For about a year that was all I listened to, I put it on and it never disappointed me. It was after all the Wire work and all the Dome records and all the various things. I put that on and was absolutely sold. Things were up for grabs, I wasn't really sure about anything else really, but this seemed really pretty solid for me. Incredible. Talking of John Peel, the last time I saw him before he died, he came up to me and said: 'What was the most disappointing gig you ever went to of someone you really liked? For me it was Howlin' Wolf with a pick-up band and I wish I'd never gone.'"

"It's no more complicated than Spirit. It's interesting what happened after the war with music and arts… In Europe [during the war], arts and music were used to further ideals, that the artists and musicians didn't share. There were people forced to make state marches, forced to glorify ideals they didn't really hold true, and the power of bullying had its most epic day. Post that, the album saw everybody throwing all the rules out. In that period of experimentation, classical music went through a very interesting walk, and when it came back, it seized on a different kind of experimentation, all of western art became more generous, and the most generous music is the stuff that rewards the listener the most. And I haven't found the same heart in any record other than those last two Talk Talk albums. They need to be listened to loud and they need to be listened to over and over again. And I'm stunned every time. How they make me feel is because of the generosity of spirit, it's like weaving spiders' webs from scraps. So delicate, so precious, but not a note or tone is uneventful."

"Peter Sellers. I think it might be the perfect film. I saw it in college. I just was blown away. This is not a unique argument unto myself, but the key thing of that film is it’s so wonderful to sit and allow this story to unfold and wash over you. The effect it had on me then is that this final scene, I was, like, weeping when this last moment happened. It’s not even a conclusion to anything. It’s not “the hero makes it home from war” or “the orphan gets adopted.” It’s not this big conclusion to an arc. Yet it is. It is like this unbelievable moment of beauty and grace, and the fact that the film never nods to that entirely until this final moment, to have such control over your medium to do that sort of thing, is remarkable in itself, I think. To see Sellers — he is so magnificent — to see him in a role like this, instead of Clouseau or The Party or something like that, that’s wonderful. But still a very large character. It’s just wonderful."