"Raw Power for me is the greatest rock & roll record of all time. I wish Bruce Dickinson [executive producer of controversial 1997 remix attempt] had never got his paws on it. I loved the original mixes, because that’s how it should sound – the guitars are miles too loud for a normal record you’d think, but just the way the guitars come in it’s perfect. I was watching this thing on telly about Vikings disembowelling people and it’s almost like that. The guitars have angles. People go on about Exile On Main Street, which is a blues record with no tunes, but Raw Power is unbelievable. I bought it just for the cover and the titles on it. ‘Search and Destroy’, ‘Gimme Danger’ - it was right up my strasse. I was 13 or 14. I loved Iggy when I was younger, still do. I can do without all the more Motörhead stuff – he’s lost some of the finesse now. But what a song ‘Gimme Danger’ is – none of the songs hang about. Every second is important. His voice influenced the way I sang a lot. Whenever we played America Iggy would turn up, and we got on fairly good speaking terms. We were playing in New York. It was like a football changing room backstage. I was having a slash – probably in the shower, and I heard someone. I walked out – obviously not with my knob out – and it was Iggy with a tight leather jacket and blue suede shoes. He looked fantastic, and I said, ""what are you doing here?” And he said, “I always come and see your shows.”"

"Blew my mind. I didn’t see it until I was middle-aged, after decades of thriving on the ongoing French New Wave. I thought of the New Wave as beginning in these subversive young Parisian cineastes’ love for American genre films. My jaw was dropped the whole length of Journey to see the sensibility and techniques of the New Wave appearing first in this Italian flick (though English-language, starring George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman). Later I read that Truffaut called it the “first modern movie,” and I believe he’s right. I haven’t researched, so don’t know if this is a commonplace, but, on a side note, it’s interesting to consider the parallels between Journey and Godard’s Contempt. They’re both about a couple whose marriage is failing, who are foreigners on a visit to Italy, where their stiff estrangement reaches a head amid the vital, pagan-slash-Catholic ancient culture of the area around Naples. Noble, erotically charged, millennia-old statuary reverently track-circled to swelling music. Local color, and travelogue landmarks of aesthetic and mythologically poetic power, integrated naturally into the story (almost Hitchcockian in a way, except with an emotional and intellectual justification). The most groundbreaking thing about it, though, is the way it’s not exactly a story, but rather a situation, depicted in fragments and episodes—the emotional situation of a couple, displaced within a continuously intruding, alien or disorienting environment, and one that keeps us conscious of death and history. A lot is pointedly artificial about it—to me the dialogue all feels like exposition, and is delivered that way, as presentation of the situation, rather than anything natural—or at least frankly cinema, but at the same time it feels like life in a way that movies hadn’t before."