"The first one would be Souls For Sale, which was actually written and directed by Howard Hughes’ uncle, Rupert Hughes. It was based on a novel that Rupert Hughes wrote. He had been an author and a playwright and he had been brought to Hollywood in 1918 as sort of an effort that Samuel Goldwyn did to bring famous authors into the movies to try increase the qualities of movies. Rupert Hughes had just fallen in love with Hollywood and once it started being attacked after the scandals of the 1920s, he wanted to defend what he felt was an industry that was getting a bad rap. He wrote this novel and they made a movie out of it called Souls For Sale, and it’s about the daughter of a fire-and-brimstone preacher who escapes her brand new husband, who she has a bad feeling about, and ends up in a movie and immediately becomes a huge star. It basically tells the story of this girl encountering the movie industry, and at every moment where something sort of dirty or scandalous could happen, she actually finds that the people in Hollywood are really hard-working and upstanding citizens and are a higher quality of human than – for instance – her treacherous husband. It’s a really interesting movie. It’s definitely an artifact of its time and place – and you could say that more literally about it than many other movies because it has kind of a documentary element about it. The director really goes out of his way to show you what the studio lots looked like in 1923, and he films other directors like Charlie Chaplin working. It’s a movie that I had never heard of before as I was doing research [for the book], and I think it’s probably the earliest sort of Hollywood movie about Hollywood."

"They'd made three albums before this that had the hits on and some other stuff that was really good, but I never really liked a whole album. There were great moments. But then Caravanserai came out and I liked the way the songs move and flow and change direction and bring in different moods and atmospheres. It was a very exotic record for me, living in Kingston in Surrey. It felt like I was hearing the real sound of the desert. The musicianship is so great. One of the things I love about Santana is that they always had great drummers. Obviously you've got Carlos on guitar, but every instrument is pushed to the front. When the Hammond player is letting rip you can really hear it. It's a very well-structured record, which back then was a very different thing to do, because it was all about the live performance, and if the song was eight minutes long you'd play for eight minutes. There wasn't the technology for any sophisticated editing so people used to play it that way to create that mood and that atmosphere. To capture that in the studio is difficult, but on this record it kind of goes beyond that. It's like somebody said there are no rules for how you do this. I don't know how to do this so I'm going to do this by instinct, I suppose. Also, for them to come in with Latin music that wasn't salsa or mariachi was unheard of. They were saying 'this is what young Mexicans do'. I just remember watching them at Woodstock and seeing [Santana drummer] Mike Shrieve and thinking my god, how do you do that? How do you play with all of them at the same time and they're all playing different things and it all works out so remarkably well?"