"Those Éthiopiques reissues were so amazing. This was the 21st one of those - it was a collection of some of her recordings. She was known as ""The Singing Nun"". The reissues introduced me to Ethiopian music. I'd never heard any before then, and I think that's probably true for most people. I was so bewitched by it. When I heard the Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou album I was totally blown away. The first thing I thought of when I heard it was Thelonious Monk. He was an obsession of mine when I was a piano-playing teenager. It also made me think of Debussy and Satie and stuff - the way the harmony just hangs there in suspension. Her playing - the manual element of it, like the way you can hear her fingers moving around the keyboard, reminds me of Monk and Mingus and those more idiosyncratic jazz musicians. It's so beautiful. This was the beginning of me thinking that Ethiopia was a really interesting culture that I knew absolutely nothing about. My wife and I moved to London into a little flat on Caledonian Road and there were lots of Ethiopian restaurants around there - it was a little hub for the Ethiopian community. Getenesh, the owner of this restaurant Kokeb, we were there so much that she took us in and adopted us. We still get phone calls from her if we haven't been there for a long time. I think it was the music and that, and right before Swim came out, my wife and I were basically not going to see each other for a year because I was going to be away so much, so we decided to go on a trip and do something special together. So we went to Ethiopia and I fell in love with this record all over again. It's such a distinctive place with a distinctive musical culture. When you're there all you hear is Ethiopian music. There's no Bieber or Western music. I thought the album was a totally undiscovered gem, a rare thing, but I heard two people that had my favourite track on the record as their ringtone! That blew me away. Imagine if somebody over here had Benjamin Britten on their phone. It gave me a sense of what a deep-rooted and proud musical culture it is."

"The last film is Animal House. Where I [veer] away from intense dramas. This thing is a perfect comedy, and I saw it right when it came out, as many people of my age did. It’s one of those films — I saw it one weekend; I went back to see it the next weekend and the next weekend. It’s a perfect piece of work and I watch it almost once a year. I’m no expert on it — can’t tell you the cast except for the big names — but it’s one of those things where I don’t even know if it’s any good. All I know is, I laughed in the same places, like Pavlov’s dog. “Hey, I’m a zit!” and the food comes out of [John] Belushi’s mouth — to me that is about the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Until he does this or until he does that. And you know: “A pledge pin on your uniform,” stuff like that. It’s funny down to my DNA. You know how it is with films. You love them so much, you almost adopt them. Like if there’s a song you really like — you almost kinda wrote it yourself. Because now it’s in your bone marrow. Animal House to me is from a much happier time of my life. As an adult I’m over-serious and worried. But as a younger person, that comedy was just so effortlessly immature and funny. The humor is not the highest brow, but it’s done so well. It works on every human cliche, like the drunk wife of the dean and the dean is over-serious… That was a film I watched usually around Christmas time. Somehow, I always find it in December and I watch it and I laugh sometimes, and I find myself crying because I miss Belushi. I think he was a great talent. I’ll watch him eating the food and I laugh so hard, literally, tears will go down my face. I don’t know the guy but I spoke to him once on the phone, briefly, but I just miss the guy. ‘Cause he’s one of my guys, like Bill Murray and Chevy Chase. All those SNL people — that’s my kind of humor. It’s just a perfect low budget comedy. It’s what you do with great acting and great writing. You don’t need a budget. You just need great acting and great writing."

"Bands have their anthems, you know, 'You Shook Me All Night Long', all that for AC/DC sure. For Those About To Rock is the call to arms, it's the definitive anthemic album. Back In Black probably had better songs, but the band started to have a sense of itself because a band stands or should stand for something, like when you have a country you have a flag for that country. But when a flag stands for something, it takes on a meaning of its own, and then people realise that the flag doesn't just represent the country, but it represents what the country stands for. The platform - in our case, platform boots. So, For Those About To Rock We Salute You is what AC/DC is all about. The graphics and that cannon and the title - and it's why they always end their set with it - it's anthemic. 'You Shook Me All Night Long' is probably the best song they've written in my estimation, but it's not an anthem. It's because the lyrics aren't on that same level. They aren't big and bold. 'For Those About To Rock (We Salute You)' means something, it's a connection. It's like nationhood. Put your fist up in the air and say, 'Yeah! This is what I believe in!' 'You Shook Me' doesn't have that, it's just a rockin' great song. When the band realises its own meaning, when a band can see itself clearly, that's when it connects. It happened to us on Destroyer. That album cover had no guitars on it, no drums, no guitars, no stage, nothing. That's when we understood that we were bigger than the music we played. But you don't see that until someone points that out to you. When you start to see your face in parades and on walls and on tattoos and all that. And when you see that there just aren't any guitars or drums in there. People are attracted to the personas. The personas are bigger than the guitars. Whereas, it's hard to have an image of AC/DC without a guitar. Without a guitar, you would say, 'Who's that?' The same goes for Metallica or almost anybody. They're musicians. We are iconic images. That's fine for me. That's bigger. That's part of pop culture."