"At 7 I contracted meningitis. It affected my brain, and I slipped into a coma. I spent a year in hospital, and during that time music didn’t play much of a major part. It was very, very hard to get to grips with myself, and it took a good four years to recover my memories. Music wasn’t really there. “By 10, though, I was running a mini-cab service, doing the bookings, which was the best job ever. The money was great so I started buying music. He added: “I was going to two record stores at that time: one in Finsbury Park, run by a sweet little white-haired old lady, that used to have nothing but Jimi Hendrix and big, deep, dense, dark dub—it was always full of Jamaicans. The other one was run by two long-haired chubby fellows who had great taste. That’s where I picked up Alice Cooper’s Pretties for You. It was a long time before he became popular. Pretties for You is a really good example of bad artwork."

"It's a perfect record. Succinct, sad, melodic, definitely its own thing. The simplicity of it was a big thing for me, that music that simple can also be really moving… I think a lot of the simplicity of it might be to do that he was having a hard time and couldn't get it together to do anything particularly complicated, but it is a wonderful record. Just doing enough and never overblowing anything works so well. Has my music taste changed? I've always listened to quite loud and quite quiet music so I don't think getting older has changed it that much, not that I can think of. I think Belong is the only quite new record on this list, which is a bit fogeyish, but I guess you have to take a long time to know if something really is the best ever. Some of these lists you look down and they say 'best album of all time - number three, The Strokes!' No, wait, something has happened here. There is a disturbance in the force."

"I love David Cronenberg and everything he is about. He’s crawled inside my head and shown me dreams I never thought I’d have. His seminal 1983 psychodrama about the power of the media to corrupt and manipulate the minds of the people through sex and violence is as prophetic as it is horrifying. The mind-boggling effects dreamt up by Cronenberg and the master Rick Baker are a work of art unto themselves. It’s prophetic and horrifying and fascinating. Poetic, where other horror films are just gruesome and punishing. And Cronenberg gives a great commentary in conversation with longtime DP Mark Irwin. The edition also contains one of my favorite special features ever: Fear on Film, a half-hour roundtable discussion with Cronenberg, John Landis, and John Carpenter, who were all making classic horror films at Universal at the same time. It’s a nice little taste of what it must have been like to be around at a revolutionary time for American horror. I wish I had been there"