"I’d be hard pressed to choose from those early records, but 1999 was a big departure from the first three and that double album was a massive undertaking. Those records where you don’t know how the hell the writer did the thing are the ones that will always have a massive mystique and weight with me. Probably the casual fan of my bass playing or the rhythm section of Guns wouldn’t be able to pick up on it, but me and Steven really worked on this groove by playing along to Prince as well as Sly and the Family Stone. We would sit in the rehearsal room and crank the music on this ghetto blaster and just play along and emulate some of that stuff. It was ‘85 and no-one knew what was going to be next, there was a big question mark. Punk was sort of in its death throes, there was this – if you ask me – really bad metal that didn’t relate to anybody, then the rest of it was up to us, people who were our age 19, 20, 21, whatever and we knew it. So we tried to go a different route and that 1999 record was a big influence on me becoming a bass player."

"I’ve been directing television for almost twenty-five years. In that time, one thing that I have learned for sure is that Douglas Sirk is the godfather of all dramatic television. It all comes from him. The best of television is redolent with his sense of ironic and knowing melodrama. He piles on the conflict in each and every scene. Bad things and disappointment stalk his characters, but always with style. The first ten minutes of Written on the Wind are literally drunk with this style. Robert Stack drinking from the bottle in an intensely yellow sports car, hundreds of leaves that blow through a Texas mansion, pages of a calendar that flip through time, and, above all else, Dorothy Malone. Nobody mambos like Malone: the sequence where she drunkenly mambos in her room while her father dies of a heart attack is choreographed for the camera like a Minnelli musical. Sirk blocks a scene with such dynamism and artfulness you can turn off the sound and know exactly what’s going on. All That Heaven Allows got me into Sirk, but Written on the Wind is the poster on my office wall—it’s a touchstone, a timeless piece of popular art."