"This is a record that has been with me so long because of the hippy environment that I grew up in. When I was 11 or 12, I remember the excitement of hearing this record for the first time. There are a couple of duds on there, and that threw me off a bit. But there are so many amazing songs that show the softer side of Jimi Hendrix - incredible songwriting and more mellow stuff, and these choruses that just explode in a really dramatic way. It also triggers a funny memory for me when I think about this record… My first girlfriend - in grade seven, when I was 12 or 13 - she was the daughter of one of the teachers at the school. She was really into Hendrix and was part of the reason why I got into him. But around the time I got hold of this record, she dropped acid in gym class. She was the first person I knew to drop acid. And then her mum came up to her when she was trying to open her locker - she was the teacher - and started talking to her. I know some people find 'Little Wing' a bit too saccharine, but all those Hendrix ballads make me so nostalgic for that time and all the people that I knew and where I grew up."

"I think they’re all fairly artful pieces of work, but I think my all-time favorite is Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, which was one of the… well, it’s like now, somebody still making a film in 2D, three years later: he still made it as a silent film [after the advent of sound], with inter-titling, and it had a recorded score. It’s one of those films that I’ve shown to many, various groups of people socially. I remember going to a DVD night in Silverlake, with a lot of very groovy LA people, and we all had to bring a film. And they were bringing along, you know, Sin City and stuff, and I did a pitch on that film, without saying it was a Charlie Chaplin film — saying it’s about an alcoholic and this young, impoverished guy, and they’re best friends when the guy is drunk and then when he sobers up he doesn’t know who he is; and the young guy is wanting to help this girl who sells flowers on the street, and she’s blind. And they were all going, “Oh my God, this sounds amazing,” and then I said it’s in black and white and it’s silent and it’s a Charlie Chaplin film — and they all watched it and were just entranced; and this is sort of like the Tarantino crowd. I’ve always loved that film."

"In my mind it conjures up those crisp autumn days. The first time I ever heard this record wasn't at the time [of release], it was a few years later. They put it out as part of a double album. That was the first time me and my mate [and early Jam member] Steve Brookes heard it. Steve lived near Woking Park and it was autumn time, so I guess that's always been part of it for me in terms of the sensations that it brings up. It's almost like a concept album in sonic terms. Like a suite almost. I went to see them about five or six years ago where they played three nights at Shepherd's Bush Empire - I went to at least two of them - where they played the whole album with the original line-up. That was really special. So many people that I talk to love that record, from all over the world as well. It's amazing that it's taken over 45 years for it to sink in. I like the English melancholic thing to it. It's something that's in the English psyche anyway, innit? Something to do with our appalling weather. It's probably my all-time favourite record. Whenever I've spoken to people who've never heard it I always try and go and buy them a copy."

"Then the second one – and let’s say, this was in no particular order – but A Man Escaped, the [Robert] Bresson movie. That has to be my favorite movie of all time, just because it always makes me cry at the end, because I feel like I’ve achieved something that the character achieves. And it tells you what happens in the title, and it makes it no less suspenseful the entire way. You’re literally feeling the sound of the gravel as he puts his foot down – those shots of the foot or the spoon going into the slot. All of these things, the editing of it, the character, the way he’s using these actors who you don’t really know, they just – you feel like they’re real people. It’s just so perfectly put together, and it’s something where I kind of feel like I’m going along with the escape in a way that’s just done by a master. In a weird way, I feel like Bresson is the Fontaine character in that movie. But what’s weird is I’ve watched it again recently, and I had a totally different feeling of it, where it was more about society and how people are talking to each other. And then you realize Bresson is just kind of making the same movie every time, just with different [settings and characters]. One’s World War II, one’s Lancelot."

"One of my favorite filmmakers is an Italian director named Mario Bava. His most famous movies have titles like Black Sunday and Black Sabbath and all that, but the one that really was astonishing at the time was a picture called Blood and Black Lace, which is one of the most gorgeously lit Technicolor movies I’ve ever seen. And it’s a whodunit kind of thing — a murderer in a fashion house and models are being killed in various gruesome ways. This is the early ’60s when you could get away with a lot more in the way of explicitness than you had been able to before, and these movies still basically played grindhouses. But it’s such a beautiful movie to look at, and the juxtaposition of beauty and death is really perverse in it. It runs through all his works, but in this particular movie, which I think is one of Tarantino’s favorites, it really comes to the fore. It’s a very entertaining picture, and very violent. Bava was completely unknown when he was actually alive. Almost nobody except, you know, the most extreme film buffs ever saw those movies. But now, as often happens to people when it’s too late for them to enjoy it, he’s now revered, and people see his movies who didn’t even know they existed before."

"Next up is There Will Be Blood. I gotta say, Paul Thomas Anderson might be the best working director alive. There Will Be Blood was such an interesting balance of showing why Daniel Plainview prospered in the oil rush of California. But it also shows how he’s essentially decrepit as a human being. He’s almost rotting away. He’s losing sight of his own humanity. It’s about dehumanization. Even outside of how gorgeous it looks, especially when the fire ignites the oil derrick and then the camera is rushing in. It’s a low angle tracking shot following Plainview as he’s rushing toward the fire. The colors in that scene are literally just dumbfounding. But the biggest thing is performance, performance, performance, performance, performance! Daniel Day-Lewis is amazing, and Paul Dano as the pastor is freaking insane. Insane! And his dynamic with Daniel Plainview is some of the most compelling s–t I’ve seen on film. The fact that Plainview views Paul Dano’s character as a necessary mechanism to control the people in the town, but he doesn’t give him any bit of respect; Plainview doesn’t believe a lick of what Dano is saying in those church services. But he feels it’s important for the people in the town that are working day in and day out for him to believe it. It’s such an interesting dynamic."