"""The first one would be Lindsay Anderson’s If… It’s a film that I love because it allows me sometimes try and explain what it was like to be a kid at an English Public School — I was a scholarship boy in the early 1970s — late ’60s where you were in — even though it’s set earlier than that and was made earlier than that — you were in a culture that hasn’t changed. I remember just watching it and suddenly feeling understood. Which was a completely new one for me. I’d be, you know, This is my world. It was like, OK, here is something Malcolm McDowell–starring, the idea of kids — while we didn’t actually shoot up the school in rebellion, it was the kind of strange stuffy environment that needed to come tumbling down, and I’d never seen that before depicted on film. For years I wondered about why some sequences were in black and white, and many years later I was reading an interview with Lindsey Anderson and discovered it was because they ran out of money for color film, so they just went over to black and white stock, which works in several places through the story."""

"The Exterminating Angel is a surrealistic movie. It’s about a bunch of people from high society in Mexico who, after one night at the opera, decide to have drinks in the house of one of them, and they cannot get out. And they spend about three months there, and you don’t know why they cannot get out, but they cannot. [Laughs] It’s a very, very beautiful and interesting story — also risky, and very misunderstood at the time that the movie opened. But you know, that’s what happened sometimes; after the second World War, naturalism and realism won the battle, so it was imposed that cinema had to be realistic always. But there was a time that it was not like that; Russians were doing expressionist movies, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for example in Germany, and all these German directors, they were doing another type of approach to movies in formal terms. And in Spain, too, we had Luis Bunuel who was doing this type of surreal movies that were very interesting. Now they can be revised in sort of a different way, with time passed. But Luis Bunuel is definitely one of my favorite directors of all time."

"I included this one because sometimes you can read things into records that aren't necessarily there. In the mid-80s I had my first proper girlfriend, we had an on/off thing for ages and then we finally split up. On the Thursday before, she gave me this Marianne Faithfull LP, so in the aftermath of the split I listened to it and heard lots of like 'ooo she's sending me a message through the songs'. I got to know the record quite well, I wallowed in the self-pity. I happened to meet her in Sheffield about 20 years later, was speaking to her and I mentioned to her about that record and she just said 'I knew we were going to split up and it was on offer at WH Smiths, it was only three quid so I just thought I'd get you that'. She'd never listened to it and wasn't making any points or comments to me at all. It shows how you as a listener bring a lot to any record. I didn't tell Marianne Faithfull the story when I worked with her... I should do shouldn't I?"